Playing with Teaching: Considerations for Implementing Gaming Literacies in the Classroom

The possibilities of gaming for transformative and equity-driven instructional teaching practice are more robust than ever before. And yet, support for designing playful learning opportunities are too often not addressed or taught in professional development or teacher education programs. Considering the complex demands in public schools today and the niche pockets of extracurricular engagement in which youth find themselves, Playing with Teaching serves as a hands-on resource for teachers and teacher educators. Particularly focused on how games - both digital and non-digital - can shape unique learning and literacy experiences for young people today, this book’s chapters look at numerous examples that educators can bring into their classrooms today.

By exploring how teachers can support literacy practices through gaming, this volume provides specific strategies for heightening literacy learning and playful experiences in classrooms. The classroom examples of gameful teaching described in each chapter not only provide practical examples of games and learning, but offer critical perspectives on why games in literacy classrooms matter today.

Through depictions of cutting-edge of powerful and playful pedagogy, this book is not a how-to manual. Rather, Playing with Teaching fills a much-needed space demonstrating how games are applied in classrooms today. It is an invitation to reimagine classrooms as spaces to newly investigate playful approaches to teaching and learning with adolescents. Roll the dice and give playful literacy instruction a try.

Contributors are: Jill Bidenwald, Jennifer S. Dail, Elizabeth DeBoeser, Antero Garcia, Kip Glazer, Emily Howell, Lindy L. Johnson, Rachel Kaminski Sanders, Jon Ostenson, Chad Sansing, and Shelbie Witte.

Antero Garcia is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Prior to completing his Ph.D., Antero was an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles.

Shelbie Witte, Ph.D. (2008), Kansas State University, is the Watson Endowed Chair and Professor of Adolescent Literacy and English Education at Oklahoma State University, where she directs the OSU Writing Project and the Initiative for 21st Century Literacies Research. She has published extensively on the intersections of pedagogy and technology.

Jennifer S. Dail, Kennesaw State University, is a Professor of English Education and directs the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project. She has published multiple articles and co-edited two books, including Young Adult Literature and the Digital World: Textual Engagement through Visual Literacy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).