Toward Anti-Racist and Critical Literacy Education in Secondary ELA Classrooms: Repairing MinecraftEDU in a Settler Colonial World

• In Event: Bringing a Postcolonial Perspective Into Secondary Education Teaching: Race, Language, and Gender in Education

Abstract

Objectives and Purposes
This study delves into how settler colonial discourses circulate in MinecraftEDU, a popular vide- game that has been incorporated into STEM curriculum in schools (Bos et al, 2014; Sharp, 2017). Little research has been done about how the ELA curriculum and classroom can serve to disrupt racist, settler colonial ideologies circulating in MinecraftEDU. Ultimately, my aim is to provide educators with pedagogical tools to, not only disrupt settler colonial discourses of racism and historical violence embedded in MinecraftEDU, but present them with anti-racist critical literacy tools for use in ELA classrooms.

Theoretical Framework and Modes of Inquiry
This study draws on settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006; Cox, 2017; Glenn, 2015) to provide a theoretical framework and mode of inquiry in this analysis. Cox (2017) defines settler colonialism as “an ongoing system of power that perpetuates the genocide and repression of indigenous peoples and cultures”. Discourses of coloniality (Mignolo, 1995), settler colonial project (Iyengar, 2019), erasive coloniality (López López et al, 2019) serves as a theoretical landscape to explore how educators can use critical literacy approaches to disrupt racist and historical violence circulating in schools. These questions guide this study: (1) What discourses of settler colonialism is MinecraftEDU reproducing? (2) Why should a critical literacy approach be used with the integration of MinecraftEDU into secondary ELA curricula?

Results and conclusions
Analysis of MinecraftEDU reveals how different notions of what it means to be human and nonhuman circulate. Student/players use their agency as humans in MinecraftEDU to present overrepresentations of man as one equating with Eurocentric views of what it is to be human (Wynter, 2003). Game interactions with indigenous people characterized as monsters allow student/players engagement in colonial and empire world building and extermination of indigenous people. Findings suggest MinecraftEDU’s representation of the human and nonhuman must be disrupted by educators. Digital storytelling with counternarratives and trauma-informed pedagogies integrated with literacy skills are some critical literacy tools. To unsettle coloniality of power, the construct of Man and colonial logic of what it is to be human (Wynter, 2003) and nonhuman (Brazelton, 2020) must be interrogated and resisted to promote critical literacy in the ELA curriculum.

Significance
This study presents a new approach to MinecraftEDU situated within a settler colonial framework in ELA curricula. Critical literacy approaches are necessary to interrogate settler colonialism discourses which MinecraftEDU exemplifies through simulated racist worlds in ELA classrooms. Students and teachers may reproduce these discourses, thus warranting critical awareness during game play and instruction. Though MinecraftEDU is recommended as a learning tool, this research demonstrates the critical need for ruthless evaluation of technology tools in classrooms (Grose, 2024). Implications convey a scholarly call for ELA curricula designers, educators, and school administrators to embrace humanizing pedagogy, and recognition of new critical literacies while using video games in multimodal contexts in secondary ELA classrooms.

Author

• Sermantha Louisy, University of Iowa