Beyond ‘Good’ Learning: Applying a Postdigital Lens to the Critical Use of Video Games in Schools

• In Event: Revisiting James Paul Gee’s “What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy”: Critical Perspectives for the 21st Century

Abstract

In his seminal work, Gee (2003) argued that ‘good’ video games, despite potential representation issues, showcased effective learning principles that schools and teachers could adopt. Researchers, game designers, school administrators, and many others leveraged these principles to not only justify employing videogames directly into school curricula (Garcia et al., 2020; Kafai & Burke, 2016), but to also restructure schools themselves (Sims, 2017).

In the decades since, critical and postdigital orientations to digital technologies have emerged which challenge the hype surrounding educational technologies broadly, and videogames specifically. Postdigital approaches have been deployed to hold the hyperbole surrounding techno-utopian promises to account (Jandrić et al., 2019), and develop more critical views of human-tech narratives (Knox, 2019). Critical approaches to videogames problematize issues of representation (Gray & Leonard, 2018), game design that encourages exploitative practices (Author, 2021; Williamson, 2017), and systems of marketization and commodification (Dyer-Witheford & De Peuter, 2009). These orientations resist assertions about the learning potential of videogames as necessarily ‘good’, in Gee’s parlance, and instead highlight their entanglements with a wide range of other social, cultural, and material phenomena (Apperley et al., 2016; Koutsogiannis & Adampa, 2022).

This paper draws on two case studies located in Australia and the United States which sought to understand English teachers’ emerging critical discourses regarding the use of videogames in schools. The first study involved two years of collaborative work with a middle years college in a regional city in the Australian state of Victoria and focused on the design and implementation of a game-centered English curriculum. The second study examined teachers’ navigation of critical, sociocultural, and cognitive discourses surrounding interactive digital media, including videogames, as they designed new curricular materials for students at an urban middle school in the Southwestern U.S. We focus, here, on data from 29 interviews, conducted with 22 teachers, across the two studies. Analysis was informed by a postdigital framework (Author, 2024) focused on three concepts: entanglement, the myth of technology-inspired change, and understanding digital educational technologies through continuities, histories and endurances.

Analysis suggests the construction of at least three dominant discourses regarding the importance of supporting students to ‘read’ and play digital games critically. First, issues of representation were expressed as the catalyst for explicitly teaching students how to adopt reading positions which contest and challenge the beliefs and ideologies in contemporary games. Second, teachers articulated a need to leverage existing literary approaches, such as close reading and deconstruction, to develop students’ understanding of how games positioned players through a combination of ludic and literary persuasive devices. Third, teachers emphasized the need to grapple with the uniquely interactive (and potentially manipulative) aspects of interactive digital environments.

While Gee’s identification of learning principles in video games associated with good learning continues to offer educators important frameworks for evaluating, incorporating, and learning from videogames, our research suggests that there is a desire amongst teachers to go beyond ‘boosterism’ claims about the learning affordances of these technologies and to push into more nuanced critical readings of videogames.

Authors

• Alex Bacalja, University of Melbourne

• Brady L. Nash, University of Florida