Disrupting Firewalls by Rewriting the Code: Dismantling Oppressive Social Structures Through Gaming

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

Abstract

How might we leverage the everyday digital practices and emergent digital literacies of youth to disrupt and dismantle oppressive social structures in our learning spaces? Against the backdrop of global pandemic and civil rebellion, our field must contend with, indeed disrupt, the predominance of hierarchical relationships that maintain strict boundaries between teachers and students in our schools. Here, we note that relationships of this kind relegate youths’ valued cultural practices to the margins, as they are rarely leveraged in traditional learning environments. In this respect, we assume educational responsibility as educators and researchers to (re)imagine and (re)design our pedagogical practices with specific attention to the types of relationships and discursive practices that can sustain consequential learning.
Our poster offers new insights and considerations for critical digital pedagogies by highlighting how video gameplay can create opportunities for young people’s expertise to be seen as valued and leveraged, supporting engagement in meaningful learning activity. Our theoretical framework understands learning to be socially and relationally constituted, placing emphasis on the importance of symmetrical relationships and relational equity (DiGiacomo & Gutierrez, 2015). Relationships of this quality can serve to disrupt and dismantle oppressive social structures, what we call firewalls, that students and teachers have learned as part of their socialization. In our view, firewalls are set up as a security measure against viruses and attacks on computer systems. We argue that educators are taught to create proverbial firewalls to maintain control of the classroom and young people’s bodies, thereby preventing students from living their fully agentic and authentic lives. In addition, firewalls ensure static conceptions of expert and novice, where adults are always seen as experts while young people are the receivers of knowledge, to be taught and corrected. Here, our analytical focus is on how firewalls can be disrupted through discursive practices and participation structures made visible in video gameplay.
Data for this study includes video recordings of online interactions and field notes collected over the course of five weeks. We will present evidence and data from gaming sessions in multiple youth-adult partnerships in school and out-of-school learning ecologies. These data sources were triangulated and coded inductively (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997).
Our findings suggest that when young people’s expertise was leveraged in the context of video gameplay, opportunities emerged for students and teachers to remix and recontextualize (Garcia, 2017) their roles and relationships as they co-constructed knowledge together. When students and teachers were engaged in free-flowing, authentic communication, new ideas, questions, and inquiries emerged. Specifically, teachers and students raised concerns about the role of ideology, race, and class as they became indexed in video gameplay, allowing for ideology to become “hackable”, tinkered with, and re-articulated.
Our study has implications for how participation structures can be realized through the intentional design of dialogical discursive practices. By examining these engagements, we hope to surface how foregrounding the everyday digital practices of youth can help in the design of learning spaces that cultivate relational equity and deeper, more expansive learning opportunities.

Authors

• Cory Montalvo, Youth Empowerment Broadcasting Organization

• Paul Clifton, Youth Empowerment Broadcasting Organization

• Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder