21st Century Teaching and Learning: Centering Student Voice with Digital Storytelling and Game-playing

This paper features data from an ongoing, six-year examination of game-informed math classes (11 tenth-grade Geometry, 9 eleventh-grade Algebra, and 1 twelfth-grade general math) in a Northeastern public high school. The researcher has worked closely with the same teacher and his students to develop and refine a collaborative testing approach piloted and integrated into in the teacher’s classes since 2017. For this presentation, qualitative data from students’ post-assessment reflections, along with over 400 hours of classroom observation and 8 student interviews, suggest that collaborative assessments reduce anxiety, honor social responsibility, and promote meaningful learning.

This work-in-progress aims to deconstruct the Europa Universalis IV Grandest LAN Party, an immersive esports event. Esports are being studied as learning ecologies that can support 21st century competencies (Anderson et al., 2018). An autoethnography (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011) of a biracial female gamer was conducted to immerse herself into the esports ecosystem. The data corpus consists of interviews with participants and organizers, multimodal artifacts, and field notes. A longitudinal analysis was conducted to identify elements that support Projective Reflection identity exploration (Foster & Shah, 2016), to design immersive game-based learning experiences for informal learning environments.

This research explores the possibilities of a collaborative digital storytelling project between preservice teacher candidates and elementary students. An alternative to traditional written case study reports in which teacher candidates document student performance over the course of their work, the collaborative digital stories described in this research were designed to offer both a shift from writing about students as other, which secures privilege (Fine, 1994) by allowing for the inclusion of student voice in describing their learning when working with teacher candidates, as well as allow for different forms of representation through the affordance of digital media.