Week One: Critical Digital Pedagogy, Digital Game-Based Learning, and Neoliberalism

While reading chapter one of Morris and Stommel's (2018), An urgency of teachers: the work of critical digital pedagogy, I was struck by the unusual applicability of this piece of reading to my pedagogical undertakings. I have just completed a course titled, 07.714 (NET) Educational Research Methods, under the direction of Heather Duncan. In the course, I focused my research upon increasing student academic engagement through the implementation of game-based learning and gamification in a grade nine Social Studies course measured through academic engagement and social inclusion. The student population, which is my daily reality, is a composition of approximately half indigenous students and the other half is composed of European descended students. The student body represents a range of diversity. Unfortunately, the reality is that the majority of the indigenous students are on the side of the education system which is failing them. As an educator in a school with almost half the student population composed of on-reserve First Nation students who have witnessed and experienced the results of intergenerational trauma.
The central focus of the research study was upon critical pedagogy, to foster agency and empower the learners. As a result of the technological limitations of the school and some of the students, I was limited in the usage of digital game-based programming. A group of students, who compromise the core of the school's gaming group, first provided me with what they wanted me to see in the classroom. There was an overwhelming desire to see experiential activities and games such as role playing, simulations, board games and card games to form the basis of a course, in conjunction with the use of game elements within the classroom, to create a gamified class. In previous courses, I had employed a semblance of game-based learning as they proved to be effective learning tools and agents of engagement and positive social interaction. Unfortunately, the largest difficulty for me was using digital components as our institution is financial and infrastructurally limited.

While we can mitigate and cure the symptoms of inequality, how can we prevent the recurrence and the growth of the disease in a systematically flawed neo-liberalist society? (Monbiot, 2016, April 15). How can we empower students and develop student agency? Critical digital pedagogy and neoliberalism are dichotomously opposed. In the midst of our competitive, greed driven neo-liberalist system, it may be necessary to maintain a misanthropic disposition where one is wary and mistrustful of the decisions of society. Our basic human relations become a competitive struggle. Neoliberalism recasts economic life in a Darwinian lens:

Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve (Monbiot, 2016, April 15).

Neoliberalism perpetuates the inherent inequality in society by vouchsafing the status quo. This guarantees the entropy of our way of life. Evidence of this is ever-present in the lives of our students who are locked into a cycle of poverty. To develop an authentic academic engagement with all students in the classroom society needs to fundamentally alter. 

https://www.slideshare.net/jessestommel/critical-digital-pedagogy

https://teachthought.com/the-future-of-learning/zombie-pedagogies-embodied-learning-digital-age/

Jesse Stommel Digital Pedagogy Slideshow

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/09/f9/61/09f961add7cb71635e6ef2753000ffd2.jpg

To implement digital game-based learning, I familiarized myself with Jane McGonigal’s seminal text Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. Near the beginning of the text, McGonigal (2011) writes poignantly that,

When we’re playing a good game—when we’re tackling unnecessary obstacles—we are actively moving ourselves toward the positive end of the emotional spectrum. We are intensely engaged, and this puts us in precisely the right frame of mind and physical condition to generate all kinds of positive emotions and experiences. All of the neurological and physiological systems that underlie happiness—our attention systems, our reward center, our motivation systems, our emotion and memory centers—are fully activated by gameplay . . . When we’re in a concentrated state of optimistic engagement, it suddenly becomes biologically more possible for us to think positive thoughts, to make social connections, and to build personal strengths. (p. 28).

This quotation has remained with me as the essential aspect of empowering learners. Playing games can be academically engaging and a cathartic experience. For me playing digital games represents the essence of critical digital pedagogy. Is this the methodology to utilize in order to successfully embody critical digital pedagogy in the face of a neoliberal system? Perhaps, through the labours of a caring educator. Check out Jan McGonigal's eloquent TedTalk below:

Sources:

Morris, S. M., & Stommel, J. (2018). An urgency of teachers: the work of critical digital pedagogy. Hybrid Pedagogy Inc. Available at https://urgencyofteachers.com/

Postman, N. (1998). Five things we need to know about technological change [Speech transcript]. Retrieved from https://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs492/papers/neil-postman--five- things.html

McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. New York, NY: The Penguin Press.

Monbiot, G. (2016, April 15). Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot