Conceptualizing Literacy in Planning for Games-Based Learning

• In Event: Portals to Understanding Learners’ Social Interactions Online

Abstract

There is considerable interest in the utilization of digital games to support learning in schools (Shaffer et al., 2005; Young et al., 2012), ludic epistemology (de Castell, 2011), and the ways in which games and game play work as particular instances of socially situated literacy and literacy constructed as design (Gee, 2007). A central challenge for literacy educators in this is to understand the nature of games as textual/literate forms; how games might be understood in practice as an amalgam of text and action, and the implications of these perspectives for curriculum, pedagogy, and students’ learning.

This paper draws on views of games and game play as entailing specific forms of literate social practice and participation in a discourse, and literacy constructed as design (Gee, 2007; Steinhkueler 2006; New London Group, 1996). It brings literacy-based insights together with perspectives drawn from games studies foregrounding the action-driven nature of games (Aarseth, 1997), and the need for critical games literacy (Buckingham & Burn, 2007; Sanford & Madill, 2007). Utilizing a model for conceiving of games as both text and action (Apperley & Beavis, 2013), it maps the ways in which teachers across a range of subject areas drew on the model in curriculum planning, and the kinds of literate/textual engagements and understandings they observed in their students’ interactions with games.

This paper reports on the utilization of the games-as-text and games-as-action model as the basis for curriculum planning among a group of Australian elementary and middle school teachers across a range of subject areas as part of a larger research project. Case study approaches were used to map the ways in which teachers planned and implemented the model in the context of a wide range of individual classrooms and schools.

Interviews with teachers and students, blog entries, course materials, field notes and student work, drawn from elementary and middle school teachers across ten schools in two Australian states. Data analysis involved coding recurring themes in the descriptive data, following Bezemer and Jewitt (2010).

The multimodal nature of meaning making and the representation of knowledge exemplified by videogames has implications for all areas of schooling. If teachers are to fully utilize digital games, practice, and planning, they need to call on understandings of games as both text and action, while addressing curriculum priorities consistent with existing discipline-specific subject areas. At its deepest level, this requires a profound reconceptualization of the nature of literacy. In this study, teachers took up this challenge to varying degrees, with curriculum planning and classroom practice shaped by an imaginative sense of possibility, and openness to literacy enabled through working with games.

The paper considers how teachers and students understand and engage with forms of literacy and literacy practices embodied in digital games. Students’ critical and creative work with games as literate forms requires sophisticated understandings of games-as-text-and-action, and the integration of these understandings in classroom practice, curriculum planning, and design.

Sample Reference
Aarseth, E. (1997). Cybertext: perspectives in ergodic literature, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Author

• Catherine Beavis, Griffith University