Leaning Into Disruption: Subverting Relations of Power and Ideologies Through Video Game Play

• In Event: Critical Digital Pedagogies: Educators, Parents, and Rsearchers Co-Designing Consequential Learning Through Play and Transformative Agency

Abstract

This poster examines how educators leverage digital practices in video game play to re-imagine learning ecologies toward more equitable ends. Specifically, we highlight how micro-disruptions in participation structures and relationships inform the design of pedagogical practices, curriculum, and learning activities. Moreover, given that COVID-19 has made distance learning the new norm, our study provides considerations for how teachers can learn to privilege young people’s interests, agency, and sociohistorical lives in their practices.
Discourses around “disruptions” in the corporate-tech industry emerge as a means to “fix” structural inequalities in public education through the implementation of the latest innovations and technologies. Often, these corporate innovators advance a “move fast and break things” ethos without being held accountable to the communities they are disrupting. Our notion of disruption differs by centering the ingenious activity (McDermott & Raley, 2011) of young people—especially those from non-dominant communities—as they glitch, hack, and resist dominant systems toward expansive ends. We see the potential of play as a rich zone of learning that allows young people to disrupt adult-centered spaces—ones that often constrain joy, radical love, and deviations from classroom norms.
Our methodological approach is grounded in notions of glitching (Author, 2018) and a hacker ethos. Specifically, we draw on Garcia’s (2017) notion of hacking to analyze how teachers and young people reauthor information to transform learning activity. Through observant participation, we analyzed video gameplay sessions between young people and adult participants, conducting follow-up interviews with research participants around their gameplay, developing cognitive ethnographies (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010), and studying the games we played as objects of inquiry. In addition, we will illustrate how relational equity played a pivotal role in reorganizing and re-mediating learning for children and adults in the video game ecologies we participated in.
Through our four respective cases, the findings revealed that video game play can be leveraged to challenge hegemonic ideologies, reorganize adult-child power relations, and position young people as experts in their everyday digital activity. Specifically, our case studies reveal how engaging in video game play with young people disrupted how educators normally build relationships with students, deficit discourses around children’s play, and ideologies that emerge in video game architectures and narratives.
Disruption in the classroom is often met with disciplinary measures that create learning enclosures for non-dominant students. We challenge deficit notions around child video gaming that lead educators and adult others to dismiss how collaboration with children in these contexts can lead to transformative changes. Our aim in this presentation is to provide examples from case-studies for how technology and the everyday media practices of young people can help us re-imagine the productive nature of children’s disruption. We aim to “lean into disruption” to uproot deficit notions of children’s activity as well as learning hierarchies that position adults as the experts and children as novices. Finally, our presentation highlights the ingenuity that children bring to learning ecologies and how relational equity as a tool can be leveraged to develop more symmetrical relationships to design more utopic learning ecologies for students.

Authors

• Edward Rivero, University of California - Berkeley

• Andy Castro, San Francisco Unified School District

• Sandra Jacobo, University of California - Berkeley

• Elizabeth Niemerowicz, University of Colorado - Boulder