Project Investigator(s): Janice Stewart, Senior Instructor, Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Project Description
This project explores the integration of gaming as a pedagogical tool in a Popular Culture undergraduate course that is taught in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. In “Paying Attention to Attention” de Castell & Jenson (2004) argue that attention to present-day economies and technologies of learning might assist educators to design pedagogical approaches that optimize students’ engagement with course outcomes, including: increased participation in active learning, engaging in scholarly knowledge-sharing, participation in creating knowledge. This project will directly tackle problems of persistent inequality that plague citizenship and climate in multi-user gaming communities. Feminist analyses of technology have consistently argued that official knowledge is mapped in ways that typically exclude members of marginalized groups and represents a very partial aggregate of culture. Participatory technologies intended to enable active relationships to public knowledge and new forms of educational innovation and participatory citizenship require careful attention so as to not reproduce conditions of systemic inequality. As de Castell & Jenson argue, educative projects that aim to integrate gaming without an attention to how gender works so as to exclude girls and women from gaming settings will “compound girls’ disadvantage”. Accordingly, this project proposes to locate games in a Popular Culture course that explicitly educates students to be able to read and write across multiple cultural texts in a critical manner that builds capacities to identify and intervene in the dynamics of systemic inequality that would otherwise limit opportunities for students to play on a level field.
Impact on teaching and learning at UBC
Research into the “cultural practices” of video games reveals that motivation to play, perceptions about, and actual play are highly gendered in ways that reveal gaming as a normalised and normalising technology. In this project, students will be supported to participate in games and to assess games with a deep level of critical awareness. Building critical game literacy into a culture of consumption may allow for the inclusion into gaming cultures of historically marginalized groups such as indigenous populations, LGBTQ folks, and racialized, immigrant and multi-lingual groups. This project aims to develop a classroom community of gamers that is intended to alter the normative coordinates of visibility and belonging. By using an inquiry based model of engagement, students’ inquiry-based learning, will make use of student inquiries, questions, interests, and curiosities to drive learning. This level of student involvement makes the learning more relevant, encouraging students to develop their own agency and critical thinking skills. Much of this will happen in online spaces making great use of flipped classrooms and flexible learning models. A key project goal will be to create a community of practice that focuses on cultural diversity and critical engagement augmented with scholarship that engages a feminist engagement with gaming. I will create a tutorial that is available to all UBC instructors that outlines the instructional possibilities for the integration of gaming into undergraduate courses. It is anticipated that this tutorial will enhance the sustainability and scalability of the project, so that other instructors can use it as a working model for enhancing their own teaching.