Gaming Places as Maker Spaces: Designed Mediated Praxis in Times of Crisis

• In Event: Moving Making to Online and Homes Spaces: Lessons for Maker Education

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: This work addresses the affordances and constraints of co-designing programs that center maker and gaming practices during a pandemic and social rebellion. We focus on the design of virtual learning environments that foster consequential learning (Hall & Jurow, 2015) for pre-service teachers and young people from non-dominant communities as they engage in our online teacher education course, afterschool club, gaming spaces, and customized social network ecology.

Theoretical framework: In response to the pandemic, our project aimed to concertedly disrupt compulsory replication (in the virtual) of mainstream pedagogical practices in teacher education by privileging the design of participation structures that center mediated praxis (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) and relational equity (DiGiacomo & Gutiérrez, 2016).

Methods and Data Sources: Data for this study includes video recordings of online interactions and field notes collected over the course of five weeks. We will present evidence and data from gaming sessions in multiple youth-adult partnerships in school and out-of-school learning ecologies. These data sources were triangulated and coded inductively (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997).

Results: Findings revealed that video game play can be leveraged to challenge hegemonic ideologies, reorganize adult-child power relations, and position young people as experts in their everyday digital activity. Specifically, our case studies reveal how engaging in video game play with young people disrupted how educators normally build relationships with students, deficit discourses around children’s play, and ideologies that emerge in video game architectures and narrative

Significance: Our work illustrates the potential of making activities using everyday materials that intersect with everyday gaming practice, namely Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto. We explore how these making and gaming practices guide young people to solve everyday dilemmas and organize for new social futures. Furthermore, we present implications for how such activities mediate robust understandings of teaching practice for pre-service teachers that leverage youth’s everyday cultural practices (Cortez & Gutierrez, 2019; Gutiérrez et al, 2019).

Authors

• Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder