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Monday 10th December 2007 2:00 pm
Kurt Squire: Building Academic Identities through After School Gaming
How can an after school program use commercial games like Civilization to transform struggling students?
Building off of Steinkuehler’s research on games and learning, we see an untapped potential for video games to help disenfranchised students develop new, productive identities in regards to learning via gaming. We argue there is a near crisis with low-income boys disaffiliating from school. One reason is this disconnect between social organization of school (which is based on an industrial model) and the social organization of the modern world, which is networked and digital. Interventions that operate according to a fundamentally different logic may be able to address these growing concerns.
Our strategy is to design learning environments that: 1) Situate gaming practices within academically-valued domains (such as science or social studies); 2) Target gaming platforms that have the capacity to support knowledge production as well as consumption; 3) Treat the entire “home-program-school” system as the instructional unit of analysis, rather than simply the game.
So, for example, we use after school Civilization clubs as a route toward developing proactive identities with gaming technologies, as it both: 1) Feeds back into students’ lives and identities at school, as they develop academic language, conceptual understandings and so on, and 2) Extends back into the home lives of students, as they start to play the game at home, check out history books from the library, and watch the History channel.
The play to production continuum
So far, we’re seeing fairly dramatic results with a small set of students who have stuck with the program for about two years now. They have developed identities as Civ players which has had an impact on their school lives as well. All of these kids who have stuck with the program are now getting “As” in social studies. The program involves playing historically-themed mods designed to illustrate world history concepts while also nurturing an interest in modding. We have had 3-4 students go into in-depth into modding, rebalancing the game, or creating historical mods for example. We are currently working with these same kids to develop historical mods for play in other classrooms, which can be found at http://civworld.gameslearningsociety.org/ Perhaps more importantly, they all have developed new interests, including career aspirations, in part, as a result of these experiences. One wants to become a game designer-- another a Senator, for example.
One key finding coming out of this work is that the emerging desire to become expert and mod is deeply socially situated.
It has come less out of any desire to “become a game designer” some day, but grows out of social experiences, such as “developing a mod to enable my favorite strategy (building Wonders), which can be used to compete with my friend”. There is a real natural continuum from play to production that we are seeking to develop. We also have a nascent after school program for designing local augmented reality games on handheld computers, which seeks to get kids designing games about social, political, or environmental issues in their neighborhoods.
Editor’s Note: See Jim Gee’s thematic overview & index for more posts in this seven-part series on digital learning and identity.
Category: Ecology-of-Games, Identity
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