Hacking New Social Futures: Speculative Dream Sprints as Sites for Futurecasting (Poster 9)

• In Event: University-Community Engagement as a Strategy for Dismantling Racial Injustice and Co-Constructing Educational Possibilities

Abstract

This poster explores gaming as “a site for sense making, synthesis, reflection, and mediated praxis and helps to refute long-held dichotomies often taken up in teacher education: theory/practice, university/community, and researcher/practitioner” (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, ar2010, p. 104). By leaning on the role playing and world-making affordances of collaborative video games, we pay special attention to how an intergenerational and interdisciplinary learning community of predominantly Black, Brown, and Queer learners tinkered with ideologies and hacked sociotechnical arrangements to imagine new social futures. This work highlights the co-design and co-participation of our community of youth and educators in a Speculative Dream Sprint where they engaged in guided reflection via storytelling and roleplay (RP) through video game avatars.

Using Vygotsky’s (1967) principles of play as an avenue for psychological development, learning, and the exploration of new social possibilities, we examine how gaming is a mediating tool for imagining new technologies that rupture cycles of oppression and dispossession. In this regard we see the potential of play as a leading activity for further and future consequential learning (Author, 2019). Specifically, we illuminate how tools emerge within the context of game play, by leveraging Wartofsky’s (1979) notion of the tertiary artifact, which he articulates as “the forms of representation themselves come to constitute a ‘world’ (or ‘worlds’) of imaginative praxis,” (p. 207). Games as tertiary artifacts, we claim, become important tools for organizing towards new social and technological worlds across digital and physical domains.

Our social design-based study (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) draws from ethnographic analysis of an undergraduate course. Participants included 10 undergraduate students, 4 community youth, 2 graduate students, three community educators, and two co-instructors of the course. The data sources were triangulated using two main processes: (1) analysis of collaborative activity between teachers and youth in a gaming learning ecology, and (2) the generation of open-ended and focused thematic codings (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Dyson & Genishi, 2005) of observational field notes, writing, and interviews.

Findings show how participants in the Speculative Dream Sprint jointly defined and resolved contradictions and dilemmas related to the use of everyday technologies. Guided through a storyline about the proliferation of surveillance technologies within the gaming environment—which mimicked similar instances in the “real world”—our intergenerational group adeptly interrogated the ideologies and political impetus behind the development of technologies that are often designed to maintain a cis-heteropatriarchal status quo (eg. Authors, 2022). Notably, our participants offered visions for the development of new technologies that could be prototyped in the game and in the physical world. This work offers implications for the co-design of learning ecologies for pre-service teachers and non-dominant youth that fosters an engagement with everyday dilemmas to serve as catalysts for further learning and the new world-making of speculative futures.

Authors

• Arturo Cortez, University of California - Davis

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Edward Rivero, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Alexis E. Hunter, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Ashieda McKoy, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Godwin W. Amouzou

• Jade Cortez-Vargas, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Humberto Echevarria-Rios, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Isabella Herrera

• Mariel Reyes Galvez, Metropolitan State University of Denver

• Scott Perkins, University of Colorado - Boulder