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Tuesday 27th November 2007 1:59 pm
Jim Gee: The Repertoire of Human Identities and the Digital World
Jim Gee introduces a new series of posts from the Games, Learning and Society Group at the University of Wisconsin about the intersection between digital learning and identity.
Over the last several decades, in the study of language, knowledge, and learning, there has been a “social turn.” Lots of different movements have contributed to this turn, but in a blog it would be a bore to list them all. So I will just append them to this entry and that way readers can get a flavor of what they are. In this “social turn,” language, knowledge, and learning come to be seen as social and cultural performances, activities, and collaborative accomplishments, not primarily as mental skills or abilities.
New ways of being in digital worlds
The work we do on Games, Learning and Society at the University of Wisconsin has this social turn as its ancestry. In this sense, it is not new. These social turn movements all suggest that any serious learning or teaching encounter is an invitation to be a new “kind of person” (Ian Hacking). This is so because distinctive ways of speaking, writing, knowing, and learning are always first and foremost ways of participating with others in social, institutional, and cultural practices. It is these “ways” that constitute for each of us our many different socially and culturally situated identities. It is these ways that define, for better or worse, what socially recognizable “kind” of students, men, women, gamers, learners, professionals, scientists, ethnic group members, citizens, etc., we are at any given time and place. Any change in participation is a change in who we are. Digital worlds, just because they open up new worlds for embodied experiences, performances, activities, open up also new ways with words, knowing, and learning, thus, ways of being new kinds of people.
But why focus on games?
Because, as research on situated and distributed cognition in the Learning Sciences suggests, human thinking is at its best when it is focused on using past experiences (not just texts or generalities) for new goal-directed action in the present and video games are just goal-directed simulations of experience.
For the most part we do not see schools doing this today. If there is any progress in history is that we have, by and large, in an up and down way, offered more people ever wider possibilities for new experiences that will allow them to expand their repertoire of human identities. Games (like books before them) are a new part of this larger process-but only if we can use and transform them wisely.We believe that game technologies and game-like learning offer new and inviting tools for young people to try out and eventually become new kinds of learners and citizens fit for the 21st century’s global world full of great perils and possibilities.
Series index:
Over the next several weeks, my colleagues in our Games Learning and Society group will present a series of posts that examine this intersection between digital learning and identity. Please check back here for links. We look forward to the conversation.
Now the boring list of “social turn” movements (our heritage):
ethnomethodology (e.g., Harold Garfinkel) and conversational analysis (e.g., Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff); interactional sociolinguistics (Irving Goffman, John Gumperz); discursive psychology (e.g. Rom Harre); social semiotics (M.A.K. Halliday, Gunther Kress); the ethnography of speaking (e.g., Dell Hymes); sociohistorical psychology (e.g., Michael Cole, Jim Wertsch); work on socially situated cognition (e.g., Jean Lave); activity theory (e.g., Yuri Engestrom); cultural models and figured world theory (e.g., Dorothy Holland); cognitive linguistics (e.g., George Lakoff); critical discourse analysis (e.g., Norman Fairclough); the New Literacy Studies (e.g., Shirley Brice Heath, Brian Street); cross-cultural communication (e.g., Ron Scollon); the new science and technology studies (e.g., Bruno Latour); modern composition theory (e.g., Charles Bazerman); work on connectionism and embodied cognition (e.g., Andy Clark); narrative studies (e.g., Jerome Bruner); evolutionary approaches to mind and behavior (e.g., Richard Dawkins, Michael Tomasello); and some versions of “post-structuralist” and “postmodernist” theories (e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault).
Category: Ecology-of-Games, Identity
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