Something unexpected has been showing up on desks lately, whether it’s in a community college classroom in Ohio or a graduate seminar in California. Not laptops. Cards—small, laminated, illustrated cards with theorists printed on the front and conceptual frameworks summarized on the back—were not highlighted photocopies of Bourdieu; instead, they were arranged into small decks and distributed among students like baseball cards were among suburban children in the 1990s. It’s a strange sight. And yet it continues to show up.
All of this did not start with a Silicon Valley startup or an edtech business with a ton of Series B funding. Launched in the late 1990s, Theory.org.uk, a British website, discreetly created what many now consider to be the first academic trading cards in history. This physical deck included social theorists such as Stuart Hall, Anthony Giddens, and Bell Hooks, each of which distilled a thinker’s central contribution into something you could hold in your hand. Growth metrics or venture capital were not the foundation of its construction. It was created by British media scholar David Gauntlett, who seemed to think that access to ideas shouldn’t have to be painful.
The length of time it took America to pay attention is noteworthy. The cards were around for years before the term “gamification” gained popularity and before edtech investors began to raise capital based on the idea that education should be more like play. There was no trend argument on Theory.org.uk. Making cards was all that was required, and the underlying theory—that handling a concept physically alters how the brain interprets it—turns out to have more enduring power than the majority of scholarly investigations.
Since then, educational researchers have documented what some refer to as the “Trading Card Effect,” which is a pattern in which students retain and apply information more easily when they are physically sorting, organizing, or negotiating it. Even though the words on a card in your hand and a bullet point on a slide are identical, the brain does not seem to handle them in the same way. Gauntlett may have understood this exactly, or he may have simply found it intriguing. The result is the same in either case.
The timeline has a certain irony. The concept of gamification was developed in Silicon Valley for the majority of the 2010s and early 2020s. Fitness apps awarded digital badges for walking, Duolingo created streaks, and Robinhood threw animated confetti when users made trades. It is currently anticipated that the global gamification market will be worth more than $30 billion. In the meantime, a British academic had already used a laminated card and a print run that most likely cost very little to accomplish many of the same learning objectives.
According to Theory.org.uk, the majority of edtech platforms continue to undervalue the importance of the social and physical aspects of learning. There is a difference between what happens when a student reads about both Foucault and Derrida in a textbook and when they are required to argue that Foucault is superior to Derrida in a specific analytical framework. There are stakes in this debate. There is weight on the card. People’s trading and reasoning processes shape their reputations, even small ones. It’s really hard to replicate that texture in a push notification.
Despite the enthusiasm on the ground, American academia has been slower to address this. Some academics continue to express open skepticism, posing legitimate queries about whether compression turns into distortion and whether a thinker such as Derrida can withstand being reduced to a card without losing everything crucial. Those worries aren’t entirely incorrect. However, a fifty-minute lecture given to a half-asleep audience also fails to maintain intellectual depth, and an increasing body of research indicates that the traditional lecture format has never worked as well as universities thought.
Whether theory trading cards will become commonplace in American classrooms is still up in the air. Academic institutions proceed cautiously, sometimes too cautiously, and in some departments, adopting anything that even remotely resembles a game still elicits automatic resistance. However, the decks continue to show up on seminar tables. Pupils continue to reach for them. Additionally, the professors who initially gave the whole thing a sidelong glance are beginning to pay closer attention to what the cards are actually doing. Apparently, this is something that the world’s first academic trading cards discovered long ago, in Britain, without much fanfare at all.
