Kahoot! and Education Perfect: A Critical Analysis of the "Engaged Student" in Gamified Learning Platforms

• In Event: Platformization as a Driver of "New" Narratives of Learning Across Formal and Informal Learning Spaces

Abstract

Objectives
While gamification in the classroom has been linked to increased student engagement (Alsawaier, 2018), some scholars have put the engaging potential of gamified technologies into question. Game scholar Bogost (2014), for instance, sees gamification as a “coercive strategy”, a marketing tool creating “value” out of “meaningless engagement”. This paper aims to investigate how student engagement is shaped by some popular gamified learning platforms used in schools in Australia. Secondly, it explores how prevailing discourses of engagement are negotiated by students and teachers.

Theoretical Framework
This paper looks at gamification as a discursive construct that produces a certain idea of the ‘engaged student’. Fairclough’s (2013) concepts of colonization and appropriation are used to conceptualize the ways in which ‘foreign’ discourses invade the classroom and shape local variations of learning identities (Wortham, 2006). Students and teachers are actively involved in ‘negotiating’ these colonizing discourses, through what Bakthin would call authorial stance: a bricolage of circulating discourses (Holland et al., 1998).

Methods and Data Sources
This paper is based on data derived from an ethnographic case-study in a private girls’ school in Melbourne, Australia. Two frequently used gamified learning platforms were selected: Kahoot! and Education Perfect. Both have been analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis. Eight teachers were interviewed and asked to reflect on their experiences in ‘producing’ student engagement with these platforms. Six students were interviewed and asked to compare the gamified elements of the platforms with their favorite digital game.

Results
Findings show that Kahoot! and Education Perfect are extensively colonized by Silicon Valley discourses, where innovation meets psychology (Williamson, 2017). As a product of the “surveillance society” (Lyon, 2001), Education Perfect frames engagement in terms of progress and on-task behavior. Kahoot! allows for a more carnivalesque experience (Bakhtin, 1968) by offering a relieving - but reaffirming - parodic twist to traditional classroom procedures, like the ranking of students. Both students and teachers have an ambivalent position towards the competitive elements in the platforms. While competition evokes feelings of playfulness and fun, students equally express concerns about ‘falling behind’, something that does not seem to echo their gaming practises at home. Rather than offering new ways of engaging students, ‘gamified technologies’ seem to reaffirm already existing tensions around learning outcomes and measurements in education (Biesta, 2015).

Significance
This paper applies Critical Discourses Analysis to platforms, combined with more agency-oriented approaches. In doing so, it offers a broader understanding of how discourses enter, are taken up by, and are negotiated within the school. Rather than perceiving student engagement as yet another variable that helps produce positive learning outcomes (Biesta, 2015), this paper studies the discursive underpinnings of engagement, opening it up for critical inquiry.

Author

• Chris Zomer, Deakin University