Digital literacies for the disengaged: creating after school contexts to support boys' game‐based literacy skills

Purpose – This paper aims to reviews the structure and format of an after school incubator program that leverages online games for literacy learning, particularly for adolescent males. It also aims to describe its dual function as both quasi‐natural context and design experiment laboratory and to discuss some early findings that illustrate the kinds of literacy practices the authors are beginning to see within their homegrown community to date.Design/methodology/approach – For the past year, the authors have been engaging game‐loving boys in digital and print literacy practices, not by playing matchmaker between them and those game communities that engage in such practices naturally, but by growing such a community of their own. Following the lead of other games‐based educational programs and known characteristics of game‐related indigenous online communities, the design encourages distributed expertise and collective intelligence in place of standardization and peer‐to‐peer learning in the form of modeli...

[1]  K. Squire,et al.  Replaying history: learning world history through playing civilization iii , 2004 .

[2]  J. Greeno.  THE SITUATIVITY OF KNOWING, LEARNING, AND RESEARCH , 1998 .

[3]  E. Vandewater,et al.  Relation of adolescent video game play to time spent in other activities. , 2007, Archives of pediatrics & adolescent medicine.

[4]  Bonnie Nichols,et al.  Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. Research Division Report #46. , 2004 .

[5]  Constance Steinkuehler,et al.  Cognition and Literacy in Massively Multiplayer Online Games , 2008 .

[6]  P. Nation,et al.  Vocabulary size and use: Lexical richness in L2 written production , 1995 .

[7]  Rob Gilbert,et al.  Masculinity goes to school , 1998 .

[8]  Martyn Hammersley,et al.  Ethnography : Principles in Practice , 1983 .

[9]  James Paul Gee,et al.  What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy , 2007, CIE.

[10]  Constance Steinkuehler,et al.  Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places" , 2006, DiGRA Conference.

[11]  D. Eisenberg,et al.  Who Receives a Diagnosis of Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder in the United States Elementary School Population? , 2006, Pediatrics.

[12]  Grant Mccracken.  The long interview , 1988 .

[13]  Constance Steinkuehler,et al.  The Mangle of Play , 2006, Games Cult..

[14]  Leonie Rowan,et al.  Boys, Literacies and Schooling: The Dangerous Territories of Gender-Based Literacy Reform , 2001 .

[15]  K. Squire.  Changing the Game: What Happens When Video Games Enter the Classroom? , 2005 .

[16]  Pierre Lévy,et al.  Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace , 1997 .

[17]  Mary B. Harris,et al.  Video games and school performance. , 1985 .

[18]  P. Donahue,et al.  The Nation's Report Card[TM]: Reading 2007. National Assessment of Educational Progress at Grades 4 and 8. NCES 2007-496. , 2007 .

[19]  V. Rideout,et al.  Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds , 2010 .

[20]  K. Crowley,et al.  The microgenetic method. A direct means for studying cognitive development. , 1991, The American psychologist.

[21]  D. Gentile,et al.  The effects of violent video game habits on adolescent hostility, aggressive behaviors, and school performance. , 2004, Journal of adolescence.

[22]  Ray Oldenburg,et al.  The great good place : cafés, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day , 1991 .

[23]  S. Michaels,et al.  A pedagogy of Multiliteracies Designing Social Futures , 1996 .

[24]  Kevin M. Leander,et al.  Literacy Networks: Following the Circulation of Texts, Bodies, and Objects in the Schooling and Online Gaming of One Youth , 2006 .

[25]  Constance Steinkuehler,et al.  Massively Multiplayer Online Games as an Educational Technology: An Outline for Research. , 2008 .

[26]  Jeffrey D. Wilhelm,et al.  Reading Don't Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men , 2002 .

[27]  K. Squire.  From Content to Context: Videogames as Designed Experience , 2006 .

[28]  Kurt Squire,et al.  Educating the fighter: buttonmashing, seeing, being , 2005 .

[29]  J. Gee,et al.  Video Games and the Future of Learning , 2005 .

[30]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation , 1991 .

[31]  Sean C. Duncan,et al.  Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds , 2008 .

[32]  Constance Steinkuehler,et al.  Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games , 2004, ICLS.

[33]  Wiebe E. Bijker,et al.  Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change , 1995 .

[34]  Thomas Newkirk.  Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture , 2002 .

[35]  Kurt Squire,et al.  Designing Centers of Expertise for Academic Learning Through Video Games , 2008 .

[36]  Matthew W. Lewis,et al.  Self-Explonations: How Students Study and Use Examples in Learning to Solve Problems , 1989, Cogn. Sci..

[37]  Peter D. Hart,et al.  The Silent Epidemic Perspectives of High School Dropouts , 2006 .

[38]  Anna De Fina,et al.  The ethnographic interview , 2019, The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography.

[39]  Constance Steinkuehler.  Massively Multiplayer Online Video Gaming as Participation in a Discourse , 2006 .

[40]  G. Harry McLaughlin,et al.  SMOG Grading - A New Readability Formula. , 1969 .

[41]  M. Commeyras.  Drax's Reading in Neverwinter Nights: With a Tutor as Henchman , 2009 .

[42]  Margaret Coulthard,et al.  An introduction to discourse analysis , 1977 .

[43]  C. Knox-Quinn.  International Society for Technology in Education. , 1992 .

[44]  Abbie Brown,et al.  Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in c , 1992 .

[45]  R. Stake.  The art of case study research , 1995 .

[46]  Constance Steinkuehler.  Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming as a Constellation of Literacy Practices , 2007 .

[47]  Abraham Pizam,et al.  A New Gender Gap , 2006, Critical Situations.

[48]  H. Mandl,et al.  Learning from Worked-Out Examples: The Effects of Example Variability and Elicited Self-Explanations , 1998, Contemporary educational psychology.

[49]  GeeJames Paul.  What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy , 2003 .

[50]  Marcus A. Winters,et al.  Leaving Boys behind: Public High School Graduation Rates. Civic Report No. 48. , 2006 .

[51]  Brigid Barron.  Interest and Self-Sustained Learning as Catalysts of Development: A Learning Ecology Perspective , 2006, Human Development.