Melissa Gresalfi

Transformational Play: Using Games to Position Person, Content, and Context

Videogames are a powerful medium that curriculum designers can use to create narratively rich worlds for achieving educational goals. In these worlds, youth can become scientists, doctors, writers, and mathematicians who critically engage complex disciplinary content to transform a virtual world. Toward illuminating this potential, the authors advance the theory of transformational play. Such play involves taking on the role of a protagonist who must employ conceptual understandings to transform a problem-based fictional context and transform the player as well. The authors first survey the theory and then ground their discussion in two units that, as part of their design-based research methodology, have simultaneously given rise to and been informed by their theory of transformational play. They close with a discussion of research and design challenges.

Game-based curriculum and transformational play: Designing to meaningfully positioning person, content, and context

Grounded in our work on designing game-based curriculum, this paper begins with a theoretical articulation of transformational play. Students who play transformationally become protagonists who use the knowledge, skills, and concepts of the educational content to first make sense of a situation and then make choices that actually transform the play space and themselves-they are able to see how that space changed because of their own efforts. Grounding these theoretical ideas, in this manuscript we describe one curriculum design informed by this theory. We also describe a study of the same teacher who was observed teaching two different curricula (game-based versus story-based) about persuasive writing. Results showed that while students in both classes demonstrated significant learning gains, the gains were significantly greater for students in the game-based classroom. Additionally, students assigned the game-based unit reported significantly higher levels of engagement, had different goals motivating their participation, and received fewer teacher reprimands to stay on task. Both quantitative and qualitative results are interpreted in terms of the theory of transformational play, which guided the design. Implications in terms of the power of game design methodologies for schools as well as learning theory more generally are discussed.

Opportunities to Learn in Practice and Identity

The theory of learning in many schools today is based on what I would call the “content fetish” (Gee 2004). The content fetish is the view that any academic area (whether physics, sociology, or history) is composed of a set of facts or a body of information and that the way learning should work is through teaching and testing such facts and information. However, for some current learning theorists, “know” is a verb before it is a noun, “knowledge” (Barsalou 1999a, 1999b; Bereiter and Scardamalia 1993; Clark 1997; Glenberg 1997; Glenberg and Robertson 1999; Lave and Wenger 1991; Rogoff 1990). Any actual domain of knowledge, academic or not, is first and foremost a set of activities (special ways of acting and interacting so as to produce and use knowledge) and experiences (special ways of seeing, valuing, and being in the world). Physicists do physics. They talk physics. And when they are being physicists, they see and value the world in a different way than do non-physicists. The same applies for good anthropologists, linguists, urban planners, army officers, doctors, artists, literary critics, historians, and so on (diSessa 2000; Lave 1996; Ochs, Gonzales, and Jacoby 1996; Shaffer 2004). Yet if much decontextualized, overt information and skill-and-drill on facts does not work as a theory of learning, neither does “anything goes,” “just turn learners loose in rich environments,” “no need for teachers” (Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark 2006). These are the progressive counterpart of the traditionalists’ skill-and-drill, and they, too, are problematic as a theory of learning. Learners are novices, and leaving them to float among rich experiences with no guidance only triggers human beings’ great penchant for finding creative but spurious patterns and generalizations that send them down

Virtual worlds, conceptual understanding, and me: designing for consequential engagement

Purpose – This paper aims to advance the idea of consequential engagement, positioning it as a necessary complement to the more common practices of supporting procedural or conceptual engagement. More than a theoretical argument, this notion is grounded in examples from the authors’ work in enlisting game-based methodologies and technologies for supporting such engagement. Design/methodology/approach – Through the presentation of two example designs, an elementary statistics curriculum and an undergraduate educational psychology course, the paper attends to the potential of narratively-rich, multi-user virtual environments for positioning students to critically engage academic content. In particular, it discusses the importance of designing spaces that afford opportunities to understand and apply disciplinary concepts in making sense of, and potentially transforming, conceptually-revealing scenarios. Findings – The paper discusses the role of consequential engagement in supporting meaningful procedural and conceptual engagement, and the potential of these designed spaces for positioning learners to develop an appreciation both of the power of the conceptual tools they engage, and of themselves and their peers as people who use these tools. Originality/value – This paper proposes a framework for design that can be applied to both real and virtual learning environments.

Narratizing Disciplines and Disciplinizing Narratives: Games as 21st Century Curriculum

Education is about revealing possibility and exciting passions, empowering learners with the disciplinary expertise to meaningfully act on problematic contexts in which applying disciplinary knowledge is important. Toward this end, we have been using gaming methodologies and technologies to design curricular dramas that position students as active change agents who use knowledge to inquire into particular circumstances and, through their actions, transform the problematic situation into a known. Unlike more traditional textbooks designed to transmit facts or micro-stories, our focus is on building interactive experiences in which understanding core concepts, such as erosion or the idea of metaphor, and seeing oneself as a person who uses these to address personally meaningful and socially significant problems is valued. It is the explicit goal of this manuscript to communicate this power of educational videogames, as well as the design steps that we have been using to make this happen. DOI: 10.4018/jgcms.2010010102 18 International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, 2(1), 17-30, January-March 2010 Copyright

Learning for a Reason: Supporting Forms of Engagement by Designing Tasks and Orchestrating Environments

This article discusses the ways that tasks and classroom cultures can be supported through the design of online immersive games. The authors focus on a mathematics unit in which students become statisticians who must understand the contextual implications of using particular mathematical tools in analyzing different data sets and reflect on what their tool choice reveals about practical situations. Through these designs, the goal is to illuminate four types of engagement: procedural, conceptual, consequential, and critical. These new opportunities to learn and to experience the consequences of decisions have the potential to change the way that students experience school. Rather than simply complying with school practices because they are important, such curricula can create opportunities for students to truly appreciate what they are doing, and why.

The Joint Accomplishment of Identity

Identity has become a central concept in the analysis of learning from social perspectives. In this article, we draw on a situative perspective to conceptualize identity as a joint accomplishment between individuals and their interactions with norms, practices, cultural tools, relationships, and institutional and cultural contexts. Employing vignettes from our prior research, we examine the joint accomplishment of identity with respect to different levels of activity, including how identity develops in relation to the practices of a particular activity, how identity shifts over time across activities, and how more enduring communities and practices frame the ways that identity develops within and across activities. We illustrate, in particular, how a situative perspective on identity enables researchers to capture the dynamic interplay of individuals and resources, thus accounting for aspects of structure and agency in all social interactions.

Intelligent action as a shared accomplishment

Dedication Preface 1. From Smart Person to Smart Design: Cultivating Intellectual Potential and Promoting Intellectual Growth through Design Research, David Yun Dai 2. Intelligent Action as a Shared Accomplishment, Melissa Gresalfi, Sasha Barab, and Amanda Sommerfeld 3. The Interplay of Creative and Critical Thinking in Instruction, Judith A. Langer 4. Developing Validity and Reliability Criteria for Assessments in Innovation and Design Research Studies, Anthony E. Kelly 5. Design Research and Twice Exceptional Children: Toward an Integration of Motivation, Emotion and Cognition Factors for a Technology-based Intervention, Brenda Bannan 6. Designing a Learning Ecology to Support the Development of Rational Number: Blending Motion and Unit Partitioning of Length Measures, Richard Lehrer and Erin Pfaff 7. The Productive Disciplinary Engagement Framework: Origins, Key Concepts, and Developments, Randi A. Engle 8. Designing Adaptive Collaboration Structures for Advancing the Communitys Knowledge, Jianwei Zhang 9. Trajectories of Participation and Identification in Learning Communities Involving Disciplinary Practices, Joseph L. Polman 10. Does Playing the World of Goo Facilitate Learning? Valerie J. Shute, and Yoon Jeon Kim Epilogue: Where Are We, and Where Are We Going?, David Yun Dai, Jianwei Zhang, and Zheng Yan About the Editor and Authors

Heterogeneous reasoning in learning to model

Conceptual learning in mathematics and science involves learning to coordinate multiple representation systems into smoothly functioning heterogeneous reasoning systems composed of sub-languages, graphics, mathematical representations, etc. In these heterogeneous systems information can be transformed from one representation to another by inference rules, and learning coordination is learning how and when to apply these rules. The study of heterogeneous representations in learning has had the benefit of focusing attention on the reality of representation in the ‘wild’. We propose that the concept of heterogeneity of representation should be extended from multimodal (e.g. diagrammatic plus language) systems to multiply interpreted systems, even when those systems are apparently homogeneously linguistic. We proceed by analysing, from the perspective of the heterogeneity of reasoning, three learning incidents which happened in groups of students engaged in learning the mathematics and biology involved in modelling biological populations. We observe both learning successes and failures that cannot be understood without understanding the integrations of heterogeneous systems of representation involved and the inference rules and operations required to get from one to another. The purpose of presenting real incidents in some of their undomesticated detail is that they show what phenomena a homogeneous theory of reasoning would really have to account for. We argue that this type of rich naturalistic data makes implausible the instrumentality of any reconstruction in terms of a pre-existing fully interpreted homogeneous interlingua.

Teaching with Videogames: How Experience Impacts Classroom Integration

Digital games have demonstrated great potential for supporting students’ learning across disciplines. But integrating games into instruction is challenging and requires teachers to shift instructional practices. One factor that contributes to the successful use of games in a classroom is teachers’ experience implementing the technologies. But how does experience with a game actually affect teacher practice? We explored these issues by comparing years 1 and 2 of a middle-school mathematics teacher’s use of Boone’s Meadow, a digital problem-solving game around ratio and proportion, in her classroom. While the two implementations were quite similar, the teacher was able to give more problem solving agency to students and use students’ gameplay time much more productively in the second year, both for mathematical engagement and for immersing students in the narrative of the game. Findings point to the importance of considering the teacher’s role when designing digital games for learning.