Modding the global classroom? Serious video games and teacher reflection

Abstract

Video games are increasingly popular with youth though scarcely evident in schools. Serious video games, or those that simulate the real world, motivate players, require decision-making, and encourage student learning about an issue, have the potential to educate students about global issues. Global education, given its heritage as an experiential, contemporary, and issues-centered education, would seem to be an ideal point of entry for such serious video games since their educational aims are one and the same. This study examines teacher reflective experiences with serious video games that have a global orientation. Findings are clustered around data categories, including skepticism about pedagogical value of video games, openness to global learning available through this medium, and tensions between representational complexity and realism. This study contributes to what is known about teacher thinking in relation to the pedagogical use of video games, particularly those focused on global content, and includes implications for teaching and research. Video games offer possibilities for personalized meaning-making, individual expression, and experimentation, infrequent activities in traditional education. Schools are most often geared toward teaching discrete bodies of knowledge in an authoritative manner that affords students relatively few opportunities to make decisions about their learning and engage innovative ways of thinking about content. Video games are increasingly popular in a wider “culture of simulation” (Squire, 2006, p. 19), as they encourage students to build stories, learn in situated and embodied ways, and probe, hypothesize, and theorize (Gee, 2003b, chapter 4). While video games are not a panacea for improving schools, they may offer an opportunity for students to think differently, particularly in relation to learning about the world. Despite these possibilities, video games are not yet widely used in schools (Shaffer, Squire, Halverson, & Gee, 2005). Teachers generally lack interest in them and some are suspicious about the connotation of “playing” in learning (Shaffer et al., 2005). Popular discourse has posited games as a wasteful distraction rather than as learning tools, and teachers, to varying degrees, have adopted this belief. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, () 71 A longstanding tradition exists in social studies for the use of classroom-based simulations, however, which are decidedly gamelike. Simulations have been studied as promoting student capacity for historical empathy (Yeager, Davis, & Foster, 2001) and building students' historical imagination (Wineburg, 2001). Simulations witnessed a heyday in social studies during the 1960s and early 70s, only to wane under the conservative restoration in subsequent decades (Rice, 2007). Similarly, serious video games allow participants to take on the perspective of another person, explore how they might respond in various situations, and develop empathy for alterneity through such activities. Global education, given its relatively brief heritage as experiential curriculum that aims to develop student awareness of social problems, inquiry skills, and capacity and attitude for civic action (Gaudelli, 2003), would seem to be an ideal platform for the introduction of serious video games, since their educational aims are essentially the same. This study examines the pedagogical value of serious video games in the context of global education. We consider how teachers value serious games of a global nature through experiential reflection. We employed a series of face-to-face focus group meetings and online asynchronous dialogues wherein teachers articulated their experiences related to playing video games. This study finds that teachers in our group were generally skeptical about the pedagogical value of video games, though they demonstrated increasing openness to the possibility of global learning through this media while raising issues of representational complexity and realism complicated by such curriculum material. This paper concludes with reflections on the implications of this study in terms of teachers' practice and research as a practice. Modding, as used in the paper title, refers to how mass-produced software, such as video games and simulations, either have built-in alteration settings or can be changed through an external, add-on program. Video games are adaptable but the term is used in a double sense, indicating that these tools may change global learning.

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