Leveraging Community-Building Through Digital Game Play in Order to Foster Healing

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

Abstract

This poster examines how youth and teachers build community as they engaged in digital gameplay, creating opportunities for healing. In our study, we examine how young people and teachers made sense of and resolved everyday dilemmas within the context of global pandemic and social rebellion. We focus on the development of symmetrical relations between teachers and young people and how it provided them with opportunities to collectively leverage their expertise for consequential learning. In our view, collective healing can be possible by centering the moral and ethical dimensions of the relational in learning environments, thereby desettling narrow conceptions of relationships between learners and teachers (Bang, Warren, Rosebery, & Medin, 2012).
Based on our study, we conjecture that intentionally designing for the following can set conditions for healing in the digital space: an ecological approach to learning, leveraging play as a leading activity (Gutiérrez, Higgs, et al., 2019), and co-constructing new tools and practices together. Here, the design of our study builds on the notion of relational equity (DiGiacomo & Gutiérrez, 2015), by purposely leveraging digital communication to create more symmetrical relations. These relationships can provide opportunities for youth to repurpose tools and digital technologies to rewrite their own history, thus becoming key historical actors (Gutiérrez, Becker, et. al., 2019).
To explore how young people and teachers learned together, we examined micro-interactional moments of side-by-side learning (Paradise & Rogoff, 2009) within the context of video gameplay. In particular, we analyzed recorded videos and written reflections on these interactions and developed an inductive coding scheme wherein healing, play, and everyday cultural practices emerged as central and salient themes (Bogdan and Biklen, 1997).
Our findings revealed that during gameplay students and teachers co-authored decolonizing narratives, made possible by the intentional design of symmetrical relations that leveraged young people’s expertise. Preliminary analyses reveal that these narratives are designed to challenge colonial dominant structures, creating opportunities for students and teachers to learn new healing practices that privilege collective praxis, challenging Western notions of individualism. In addition, the development of these narratives addressed constraints and possibility across multiple scales, from the structural to the everyday. This allowed students to play with ideology and power as it emerged within game play and in their everyday historicized circumstances.
Our study has implications for the design of in-school and out-of-school learning environments and how video gameplay mediates the development of symmetrical relations between teachers and learners, an area of inquiry traditionally absent from our field. In particular, our study offers considerations for how we might center healing as a valuable construct for examining learning as both a process and outcome, especially as young people and teachers co-construct decolonial narratives.

Authors

• Kaitlin Baca, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Carina Aguirre, San Francisco Unified School District

• Aya Bensing, Los Angeles Unified School District

• Mariela Ramirez, San Francisco Unified School District

• Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder