Constance Steinkuehler

Biography

Photo of Constance Steinkuehler

Constance Steinkuehler is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Communications and Technology (ECT) program in the Curriculum & Instruction department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a founding fellow of the GLS Initiative at UW–Madison and chairs the annual GLS conference held each summer in Madison. Her research on cognition, learning, and literacy in MMO games has been funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Academic ADL Co-Lab, including research on such commercial titles as Lineage I, Lineage II, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, and, most recently, RuneScape. She earned her PhD in literacy studies in curriculum and instruction in 2005, her MS in educational psychology in 2000, and three simultaneous BAs in mathematics, english, and religious studies in 1993. She teaches graduate courses in research in online virtual worlds, analyzing online social interaction, critical instructional practices on the internet, and gender and technology, and an undergraduate course in digital media, pop culture, and learning. She sits on the editorial board of several journals including the Journal of the Learning Sciences, the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, and Second Nature: The International Journal of Creative Media. She is the Chair of the AERA SIG “Media, Culture, and Curriculum,” sits on the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Gaming, Simulations, and Education, and recently received a NAS/Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship.

Her current work focuses on the potential of virtual worlds to function as sandboxes for the reconstruction (or, perhaps, reinvigoration) of a new form of twenty-first century citizenship — a “pop cosmopolitanism” marked by the willingness to engage in an increasingly globalized and therefore diverse socio-technical world and the development of intellectual practices crucial to successful navigation within it. Such intellectual practices include informal scientific reasoning, collaborative problem solving, media literacy (defined not just as critical media consumption but also production), computational literacy, and the social learning mechanisms that support the development of such expertise (e.g., reciprocal apprenticeship and collective intelligence). She has been a siege princess, a mon calamari dancer, a human priest herbal/alchemist with a penchant for flowers in dangerous places, Wu the Lotus Blossom with a best friend named Dawn Star, a pudgy spaceman who orders around many small vegetable-ish creatures, a pink Master Chief, the misunderstood hero of the story, the last chance at world salvation destined to save the world (and the princess), god, and the master of a very big ball.

Sessions