Kathy Sanford

Understanding the Power of New Literacies through Video Game Play and Design

In this article, we provide the results of our examination of the range of multiliteracy activities that engage boys’ time and attention, and the types of literacy skills and understandings they learn through their engagement with alternative texts. We focus particularly on video game play and creation/composition as a learning activity that consumes a great deal of their out ‐ of ‐ school time. Our observations and conversations with adolescent boys suggest that significant, powerful learning is happening through video game play and creation, and calls into question claims that boys are not succeeding at literacy, instead suggesting the potential for critical engagement with new literacies. Key words: multiliteracies, technology, video games, composing, alternative texts Dans cet article, les auteures presentent les resultats de leur analyse d’un vaste eventail d’activites de multilitteratie auxquelles se consacrent les garcons a l’adolescence et des types d’aptitudes et comprehensions qu’ils apprennent a maitriser au moyen de textes alternatifs. Les auteures se sont penchees tout particulierement sur les jeux video et la creation/composition comme activite d’apprentissage occupant une tres grande partie des heures passees en dehors de l’ecole. Leurs observations et les conversations qu’elles ont eues avec des garcons semblent indiquer qu’un apprentissage important a lieu a travers les jeux video et leur creation, ce qui remet en question l’affirmation selon laquelle les garcons ont des lacunes en litteratie et suggere plutot que les nouvelles litteraties offrent un potentiel sur lequel il y a lieu de reflechir. Mots cles : multilitteraties, technologie, jeux video, composition, textes alternatifs

Resistance through Video Game Play: It's a Boy Thing

The male youth in our study used video games to resist institutional authority, hegemonic masculinity, and femininity. Videogame play offered them a safe place to resist authority, which was often limited to small acts of adolescent defiance that could limit their future ability to engage thoughtfully and critically in the world. This resistance shaped and reinforced their identity formation and supported their resistance to traditional literacy practices they considered more feminine. Adults were absent from their play; hence they had no mentorship in critiquing the worldview presented in videogames. Key words: masculinity, identity, critical literacy, alternative literacies Dans cette etude, les garcons se sont servis de jeux video pour resister a l’autorite institutionnelle ainsi qu’a une representation hegemonique de la masculinite et de la la feminite. Ces jeux leur offraient un espace dans lequel ils pouvaient en toute securite opposer une resistance a l’autorite sous la forme de modestes gestes de defi typiques des adolescents. Ces gestes risquaient toutefois de limiter leur capacite future de s’engager dans le monde avec serieux et en faisant preuve d’un esprit critique. Cette resistance a faconne et renforce leur identite et concordait avec leur contestation des methodes de litteratie traditionnelles qu’ils consideraient comme plutot feminines. Les adultes etaient absents lors de leurs jeux ; les jeunes n’avaient donc pas de mentors pour critiquer la vision du monde presentee dans les jeux video. Mots cles : masculinite, identite, litteratie, esprit critique, litteraties alternatives.

Critical Literacy Learning through Video Games: Adolescent Boys' Perspectives

The rapidly growing phenomenon of video games, along with learning that takes place through video game play, have raised concerns about the negative impact such games are reputed to have on youth, particularly boys. However, there is a disconnect between the discourse that suggests that boys are failing in learning literacy skills, and the discourse that suggests that they are learning highly sophisticated literacy skills through engagement with video games. This article reports on a research project investigating the literacy skills boys are learning through video game play and explores whether these skills are actually beneficial and whether they aid learning or distract from more useful literacy learning and healthy pursuits.

Countering a ‘Back-to-Basics’ Approach to Teacher Education: Multiliteracies and On-Line Discussions in a Community of Practice

Aiming to extend sociocultural theory about literacy education in teacher programs, this article reports on results from a qualitative study conducted in a Western Australian university. The project tracked a group of initial teacher and graduate education students collaborating in on-line discussion embedded in a literacy course. The article focuses on how one pre-service teacher constructed situated identities and understandings about literacy as she interacted on-line with peers and the course instructor in a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Suggestions are provided for designing on-line CoPs that consider power and an expanded definition of literacies.

Serious games: video games for good?

As video games become a ubiquitous part of todays culture internationally, as educators and parents we need to turn our attention to how video games are being understood and used in informal and formal settings. Serious games have developed as a genre of video games marketed for educating youth about a range of world issues. At face value this seems a worthwhile enterprise; however, how is this genre viewed by youth who are immersed in video game culture? This paper explores what can be learned by inviting a group of youth to play and analyze current “serious” games. Key findings include adolescents’ comments on how serious games compare to mainstream entertainment-based games and how world issues are represented in games. Implications from this research suggest that serious game designers need to pay attention to the perceptions and experiences of gamers if video games are going to be developed as instructional tools for youth and children.

Adult Education and Lifelong Learning in Arts and Cultural Institutions: A Content Analysis

Using a content analysis approach, this article shares the results of scholarly adult education study on museum and library adult education and learning as represented in peer-reviewed publications over the past 60 years. Findings show a paucity of studies in general, but particularly around libraries. The majority of publications on libraries were ‘non-research-oriented’, and published in the 1950s and 1960s; museums were all but ignored until studies began to appear in the 1990s. Early concerns focused on elitism and the educational role, while later studies began to debate social and interpretive issues. Although museum and libraries theorists call for critical discourses and studies, with few exceptions adult education research is dominated by liberal discourses. We conclude the article with a number of recommendations for future study in this important yet underresearched and undertheorized area.

Museum Hacking as Adult Education

Preparing pre-service teachers to engage in the greater-than-school world, think broadly about alternative sites of learning and address contemporary issues in education and society is challenging, and requires connections between formal, non-formal and informal education. Museums are spaces that can provide this, as they can engage students with historical artefacts and narratives that provide a platform to develop critical understandings about the world around them. However, museums can also be sites of hegemonic oppression and exclusion that perpetuate the status quo by excluding or misrepresenting some stories whilst privileging others (Clover, 2015). Critical pedagogy in museums is about rendering visible these hidden or misrepresented stories (Borg & Mayo, 2010).

Adult education through museums, heritage and exhibitory practice

Welcome to this special edition of Studies on adult education, museums, heritage and exhibitionary practice. It is a compendium of work by established scholars as well as students and museum practi...

Knowing Their Place

Worldwide, public museums are being challenged to toss off the shackles of elitism, neutrality and “detachment from real world politics” (Phillips, 2011, p. 8), and contribute to struggles for social, cultural and ecological justice and change. Pedagogical responses range from workshops aimed to disrupt or challenge stereotyping, to ‘kitchen conversations’ where cultural history sheds light on a complex multi-cultural present; and from participative community videos of counter narratives to normative economic discourses to collaborative exhibitions highlighting controversial topics such as sexuality (e.g. Clover, 2015; Clover & Dogus, 2014; Gosselin, 2013; Sandell & Nightingale, 2012; Steedman, 2012).

Adult education and exhibitory practice within and beyond museum and art gallery walls

Canadian author and poet Marlene Nourbese-Philip once argued that culture was not an insignificant site of struggle, but that its power lay in masking that very fact. There are perhaps no better masters of this disguise, none better at carrying off a complex masquerade, than our public museums (including art galleries), the focus of this special edition of the Journal of Adult and Continuing Education. Museums and art galleries present a façade of motionlessness and dispassion, yet they shape actively ‘our most basic assumptions about the past and about ourselves’ (Marstine, 2006, p. 1). These institutions look to be impartial, objective and ‘detached from real world politics’ (Phillips, 2011, p. 17), when in fact ‘politics has always been a constant interruption to their imagined sanctity’ (Macdonald, 1998, p. 177). Museums and art galleries appear solely to legitimise and maintain the status quo through selective stories or representational practices, yet there has been near constant questioning of their problematic assumptions about ‘cultural production and knowledge’ (Macdonald, 1998, p. 176; see also Marstine, 2006). ‘Patriarchal barriers of power and control traditionally characterise museums’ (Golding, 2013, p. 81) yet women have been present since their inception, and have contested acts of marginalisation (Levin, 2010; McTavish, 2008). And although preservation and conservation seem their most important mandates, these institutions are, by their own admission, first and foremost, pedagogical institutions (Bedford, 2014; UNESCO, 1997). This perplexing camouflage is perhaps one reason why museums and their exhibitionary practices have, for the most part, evaded the torchlights of adult educators searching for hopeful possibilities within the disorientating array of society’s contemporary problems. But these societal problems are central to the studies and Journal of Adult and Continuing Education 2016, Vol. 22(2) 113–116 ! The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1477971416672321 adu.sagepub.com