Introduction-Summary
The objective of this study by Lacasa, Martínez, & Méndez (2008) is to examine how videogames viewed as semiotic and cultural tools can support and create innovative educational settings. Using videogames in an educational setting can inspire different forms of narratives, such as oral, performed, and written. The authors use a Bakhtinian perspective to look at videogames in the classroom. According to Lacasa et al. (2008), Bakhtin (1999) examined Dostoevsky’s novel where Dostoevsky "permits his character to speak in their own voices with a minimum of interference" (p. 86). Using a Bakhtinian perspective, the authors will analyze how an individual's meaning and perspective of the world shapes a character. Furthermore, they use Bakhtin's contribution to analyze relationships between videogames and narratives (Aarseth, 2001; Jenkins, 2006; Ryan, 2001). The authors claim the following three objectives in Bakhtkin's work may also be applied to their study:
1) Classrooms as a polyphonic context-
The view of Bakhtinian polyphony helps us understand a way to use the diversity of a classroom's goals and voices in a pedagogical way. Bakhtin speaks of communication as means to communicate between two people as subjects not just objects. These ideas help the authors build social relationship models for the classroom. The authors conclude that a traditional classroom model of communication is not dialogical but monologic, the teacher is the single voice. Olson(2003) relates to this monologic standards by saying educational settings need to implement individual subjectivities as they can produce many forms of leaning and development. For the authors these individual subjectivities were important when working in the context of the Tomb Raider videogame and though the game creating social relationships in the specific setting of a school and its individuals participating. This study will examine "the extent to which joint participation in playing videogames allows the individual subjectivities and goals of all participants to be aligned" (p. 87).
2) Diversity of social words, dialogue and literacy-
Bakhtin viewed Dostoevsky’s novel as having diverse voices in multiple social and cultural contexts, including discourses popular outside of a classroom. The authors agree that introducing multiple discourses in multiple contexts is important but difficult to achieve, but videogames allow you to introduce different semiotic domains for learning in a more global system with these four processes:
• Learning new approaches to the world, using new kinds of discourses.
• Participating in a social group that shares this domain.
• Obtaining resources that prepare people for new ways of learning and solving problems.
• An active process of “critical learning”, in which the learner is situated on a meta-level that allows him/her to establish relationships among the parts of a global system(p. 88)
The authors established this theoretical model to go beyond writing and literary content as they wanted to include meta-semiotic consciousness and present multimodal environment. Moreover the teacher required the children to create a play based on the Tomb Raider videogame to help the children use multiple discourse. The framework for theater in the classroom is based on Schonmann(2006).
3) Discourse, narrative and videogames
In this section the authors talk about how there are monologic and dialogic videogames. Based on Bakhtin, the monologic games, just like monologic characters in novels, don't leave much room to the imagination because it is all given to you. The dialogic games are more open-ended leaving gaps to be filled in multiple contexts and multiple discourse. A game like Tomb Raider is a dialogic game that allow the player to make the decisions of the character, including feeling the emotions of the character.
There are two main approaches to games and narratives: Ludologists (prioritize rules of game) and Narratologists (consider the fiction as focus). Jenkins (2006) connects the approaches through the following principles:
• “Not all games tell stories”; for example, graphical games such as Tetrix.
• “Many games do have narrative aspirations”; for example, they do that by tapping the emotional residue of previous narrative experiences.
• “Narrative analysis need not be prescriptive ”; that is, there is more than one privileged way to build and elaborate stories.
• “The experience of playing games can never be simply reduced to the experience of a story”; factors which have little or nothing to do with storytelling per se are emphasized; for example, those which are highly dependent on specific communities of players.
•“If some games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories”; for example, the way in which TV and games tell stories are not the same. (p. 672-673)
Jenkins also includes spatiality to point out videogames are more narratives than stories. Spatiality is important to this study as the geography of the character creates the story.
Data collection and analysis
The study took place in a Spanish public school multimedia workshop on seven occasions of two-hours each. The participants were 3rd graders between the ages of 8-9 years old, 11 boy and 10 girls. Lacasa et al. (2008) describe their study is based on a qualitative analytical perspective on narrative and ethnographic approaches that include a micro-ethnographic analysis of multimodal discourses. The authors were participant observers who used various methods for data collection. The methods are field/work diary, photography, compilation of class work, audio and video recordings, digitalization of recording and computer programs used (p.90). The analysis of the data was in several phases based on 1) the unit of analysis were organized by social and cultural processes, 2) to analyze patterns they treated each contribution as mutually dependent on their context.
Objective
"The goal of this paper has been to explore how videogames as semiotic and cultural tools support the creation of innovative educational settings and contribute in the growth of oral, performed, and written narratives in the classroom" (p.102).
Conclusions
1. The role of videogames as educational tools relates to the importance of considering the perspectives and roles that children, teachers and investigators assume as participants in the institutional setting of their classroom
a. teacher, students and researchers joint efforts to unite their own subjectivities by joining their voices together, which is a hard task
b. the game took a new meaning to the students when introduced in the classroom context, creating difficulties in goals
c. teacher and researcher also had problems interpreting the goals the same way
2. The use of media such as digital games complements the use of other written or audiovisual methods and permits the development of multiple literacies in the classroom.
a. scripting and performing the Lara Croft play
b. publishing their own experiences on a web page
c. children learned how to control multiple ways of talking, writing, understanding and producing images and sounds to communicate with other people
3. It was possible to construct narratives using Tomb Raider
a. work like fairy tales which children heard from adults and then learn to retell in specific contexts and with other members of their communities
b. the children began to construct an oral story, with spatial exploration over plot development
c. children constructed planning and production of their web page with adults using multiple codes, texts and images
4. Meta-cognitive process involved in their learning activities when they related to the videogame content during the workshop
a. children became conscious of elements of the game that were part of its narrative
b. they were conscious of specific social problems related to violence, and of the moral dimensions of Lara Croft’s activities (p. 102-103)
Response
The topic of using videogames for the development of literacy is interesting and needed. I think the study shows that commercial videogames can be used in class to develop literacy through narratives. The context videogames provide is full of multiple possibilities for creative writing in different forms. Videogames can act as multiple tools for students pedagogical needs. What the researchers demonstrate is that there has to be a clear plan of how the game is going to act as a medium for learning. The children, teacher(s), and researchers need to be able to know what the goal is going to be in order to achieve the objective. Spatiality also seems to play a big part of the success of the videogame for narratives. I think more about spatiality could have been included in the literature review. Although I really liked this study, the paper was difficult for me to follow. The sections could have been ordered in a more transitional form. I had to re-read multiple times to see how the article connected the study to the theoretical framework. I did not get clarification of what they were really looking to answer until the conclusions. However, I think the study itself is a great model for future studies of commercial videogames implementations in classrooms.
No comments:
Post a Comment