After-School Online Gaming Lab for Guys

Constance Steinkuehler · Elizabeth King · David Simkins · Esra Alagoz · Sarah Chu · Yoonsin Oh · Aysegul Bakar Corez · Bei Zhang

Wed., June 10, 5:00–7:00, Great Hall (4th floor, Central)

Previous games and literacy research documents the important forms of literacy fostered through participation in high-end communities in MMO games, yet teenage guys, a particularly captivated audience for gaming, still struggle in literacy-related activities and assessments in schools. This poster reports on our work over the last 2 years in piloting (n=8) and then implementing (n=25) an innovative solution to the issue in the form of an after-school online gaming lab for guys. Our participants were local, mostly rural young men between the ages of 13–18 identified as “at risk” and failing in literacy related classes yet highly motivated by games. Our goal was to leverage their existing interests to strengthen and enrich their engagement in literacies with payoff not just in school and beyond it in their everyday lives at home and (future) work. In this poster, we detail the structure and format our after-school incubator program, its dual function as both a quasi-natural context and design experiment lab, the philosophical and practical challenges we encountered, and some of our early findings. We conclude with a broader discussion of both the potentials and the challenges inherent to taking this sort of “piggyback” (Newkirk, 2002) approach to literacy learning, and the research questions it raises for GLS research more generally.

References

Newkirk, T. (2002). Misreading masculinity: Boys, literacy, and popular culture. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.