Postdigital Science and Education - Call for Contributions - Video Games, Literacy, and Teaching in a Postdigital Age
In 2003, James Paul Gee released What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, a book that would become foundational for those working in game studies, literacy studies, and education. In the original version, Gee identified 36 principles of ‘good learning’ which he argued were built into the design of good games. Through an investigation of these principles, and their manifestation in popular games, Gee inspired a generation of scholars and teachers across fields to think and work with video games in ways that conceptualised their value in ways that moved beyond engagement. As a result of drawing comparisons between the presence of these principles in games and their absence in many school contexts, Gee positioned video games as educational technologies. This positioning has been used by scholars and edtech entrepreneurs alike to make a wide range of claims about the so-called learning ‘affordances’ of video games, and their potential to unsettle the landscape of formal education.
The emergence of the postdigital as a concept for theorizing our relationships with digital technologies draws attention to the ways that such technologies shape the core of education (Knox 2019). The postdigital holds-to-account the broad cultural understandings that the term ‘digital’ has come to represent (Jandrić et al. 2019), rejecting techno-positivism innovation narratives (Cramer 2015). The tendency for postdigital perspectives to challenge grand narrative claims about the educative potential of digital technologies provides rich analytical frames for revisiting Gee’s claims about the transformative learning benefits associated with playing, making, and studying videogames. If we are moving into a critical post-videogaming phase (Koutsogiannis 2022), what might this mean for the generation of questions that produce new insights into Gee’s seminal work? How might shifts from video game literacies to postdigital literacies (Apperley 2016), and the associated entanglements between technologies and social practices, lead us to rethink Gee’s 36 principles?
In this call we invite you to submit 500-word responses which consider postdigital reconfigurations of Gee’s (2003) What videogames have to teach us about learning and literacy. Responses will be collated and published in a collective response article (see example of a collective response article (this opens in a new tab)).
More information about What videogames have to teach us about learning and literacy can be found here (this opens in a new tab). The book, James Paul Gee (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, is available from Macmillan Publishers here (this opens in a new tab).
Please write your 500-word response, adhering to the PDSE house style (this opens in a new tab), and return it to Alex Bacalja (University of Melbourne, Australia), alex.bacalja@unimelb.edu.au (this opens in a new tab). Responses will be collated into a collectively authored article and prepared for publication. We look forward to your contribution!
Deadline for submitting your responses is 30 June 2024. Please contact Alex Bacalja if you have any questions.
References
Apperley, T., Jayemanne, D., & Nansen, B. (2016). Postdigital literacies: Materiality, mobility and the aesthetics of recruitment. In B. Parry, C. Burnett, & G. Merchant (Eds.), Literacy, Media, Technology: Past, Present, and Future (pp. 203-218). London: Bloomsbury.
Cramer, F. (2015). What is ‘post-digital’? In D. M. Berry & M. Dieter (Eds.), Postdigital aesthetics: Art, computation and design (pp. 12–26). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437204_2 (this opens in a new tab).
Jandrić, P., Ryberg, T., Knox, J., Lacković, N., Hayes, S., Suoranta, J., Smith, M., Steketee, A., Peters, M. A., McLaren, P., Ford, D. R., Asher, G., McGregor, C., Stewart, G., Williamson, B., & Gibbons, A. (2019). Postdigital Dialogue. Postdigital Science and Education, 1(1), 163-189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-018-0011-x (this opens in a new tab).
Knox, J. (2019). What does the postdigital mean for education? three critical perspectives on the digital, with implications for educational research and practice. Postdigital Science and Education, 1(2), 357-370. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-019-00045-y (this opens in a new tab).
Koutsogiannis, D., & Adampa, V. (2022). Videogames and (language) education: Towards a critical post-videogaming perspective. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 22, 1-28. https://doi.org/10.21248/l1esll.2022.22.2.366 (this opens in a new tab).