“You Can Create an Authentic Experience”: Teacher Desires and Tensions Around Classroom Game Implementation

• In Event: Games as Dialogues Between Pasts and Futures: Playing Toward Educational Reimagination

Abstract

Purpose: Working with various audiences (practitioners, literacy researchers, game designers in education, etc.) over the last few years, the Critical Gaming Literacies Study Group has been collecting interviews from a broad audience of educators, eliciting their desires and tensions around implementing games within the classroom.

Framework: In educational contexts, theorizing gamification vs. game-based learning is an important distinction. We distinguish between interactive, competitive activities that support traditional classroom structures and objectives (gamification) from learning activities that disrupt such structures through affordances of game-based curricular design, following York et al. (2022). In alignment with the AERA call for proposals, we attend to teacher learning with respect to their past (Why gaming? How to enhance motivation and engagement?); present (what is curriculum like currently?), and imagined futures (What could classroom game-based learning look like to solve past problems?). We join with Levine et al. (2023) to consider how to engage across “the schools we have and the schools we need” (Williamson & Moore, 2021), considering what types of support might be needed to move toward schooling “otherwises.”

Methods: We conducted an interview analysis (Weiss, 1995). This presentation shares findings from six semi-structured interviews, lasting 30-60 minutes each, conducted with educators across subject areas and teaching contexts, focused on their experiences with gaming. Each PI on the research team identified 1-3 subjects to interview, drawn from various areas of the research study.

First our team conducted a first round of open coding, with a focus on benefits and barriers. This led us to an analytic matrix looking across the data for cross-cutting concepts: in addition to benefits and barriers, we attended to each participants’ professional and personal familiarity with games; to the competing objectives they met or sought to meet through games; and to the ways in which they selected games and gaming approaches.

Findings: Preliminary themes focus on places of productive tensions that teachers navigated with respect to professional learning around game-based pedagogies. We noticed some differences in what is labeled a “game,” distinguishing between “schoolified” gaming experiences, such as gamification or gaming-focused professional developments, and more expansive engagements with gaming, such as learning from informal contexts or teachers’ own experiences playing games. We identified the need to interrogate inclusion of competition in game-based learning in order to foster engagement, looking for ways that teachers embraced or leveraged cooperative gaming as well. We will also share ways that teachers conceptualized taking up games in ways that recognized and drew upon the affordances of teacher, learner, and game objectives.

Discussion & Implications: As we think about how gaming is used across professional and educational spaces, we will consider how elements of gaming are co-opted across different spaces and ways instruction can emphasize gaming identities and literacies practices.

Authors

• Hannah Dietrich, Sam Houston State University

• Virginia Killian Lund, University of Rhode Island

• Karis Michelle Jones, Baylor University

• Joshua Jonas, Baylor University