Gaming the System: Adolescent Scholarship and Literacy in Minecraft

• In Event: Roundtable Session 48
  In Roundtable Session: Writing and Literacies SIG Roundtable 6. Game On: Youth Participation and Identity in Video Games, Popular Literature, and Self-Expression

Abstract

In keeping with the theme of the 2016 AERA conference, “Public Scholarship to Educate Diverse Democracies”, this paper argues that the out-of-school digital literacy practices of youth can provide a generative site for exploring the intersections of educational inequality, schooling, and the imbricated identity construction of youth. To this end, we present analyses of youths’ out-of-school literacy practices and their close, imaginative engagement with the open world “sandbox” game, Minecraft. The examples we explore call into question common conceptualizations of play, academic rigor, and the curricular affordances of gaming, while simultaneously offering more agentive understandings of youth gamers, their identities, and their literacy practices.

Authors

• Rob Simon, University of Toronto

• Jason Brennan, University of Toronto

• Ty Walkland, University of Toronto