Facilitating dialog in the game-based learning classroom: Teacher challenges reconstructing professional identity

Despite widespread interest in the use of digital games to engage students and enhance the quality of student learning, the teacher’s perspective has been less extensively studied. The challenges that teachers face when enacting authentic game-based learning predicated on dialogic pedagogy in the classroom offer powerful opportunities for professional learning despite potentially engendering stressful experiences. In this paper, we draw on the conceptual frame of dilemmatic spaces to theorise and document challenges teachers encounter when learning to enact dialogic facilitation in a game-based learning curriculum. Based on coded interview data drawn from nine teachers, our findings suggest that teachers wrestle with tensions engendered by habituated modes of classroom teaching and the need to redefine power relations with students. They experience a gap between their existing professional practice when they embark on the curriculum—their being—and striving to perform the role of an effective dialogic teacher—their becoming. The (re)construction of teacher identity that emerges is contingent on how teachers respond to continuing professional development as well as how they deal with challenges they face in the classroom. Keywords: dialog, dilemma, game-based learning, performance, identity, becoming I Must Not Prepare ! Relax. Breathe. Be yourself. This time I went unprepared. Or so I managed to convince myself. I didn’t go through any readings this time, didn’t run through how the discussion should go in my head but merely decided on an anchor for the discussion. These were some points raised during the discussion; “Money can buy everything”, “the teacher betrayed us”, “everyone started to attack us”, “we need to build up resources”, “we need to be prepared”. Each time a point was raised, my mind went into overdrive thinking of ways to bring the discussion “back on track”. Turned out, it was a rather weak attempt to “yank” the discussion back to where I’d wanted it to go. The discussion became disjointed and in my opinion, had failed rather miserably again. Instead of being a point of reference, the anchor became the yoke. (Teacher’s blog entry, reflecting on a game-based learning lesson) Chee, Mehrotra and Ong