Gamification of graduate mentoring: What the academy can learn from video games

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Thursday 4:15pm
  In Poster Session: Rethinking Graduate Education: Power, Play, and Well-Being

Abstract

(Re)imagining a better future in/for graduate education requires engaging with our pasts and presents, ugly or otherwise. With this in mind, our paper explores what playing video games–and, in particular, what approaching them, playfully, as mentor texts–might have to teach us for this endeavor. Our proposal provides a glimpse into this experiment in gamification by focusing on the lessons Author 1 learned from playing one such video game, Hades. In so doing, it blurs the lines between failure and success, inviting the reader (and the Academy in general) to embrace ‘losing’ as a mechanism for personal and institutional growth.

Authors

• Carlson Coogler, Baylor University

• Stephanie Anne Shelton, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill