*CFP* "REVISITING TEACHING AND GAMES", SPECIAL ISSUE, GAMEVIRONMENTS JOURNAL

Games educate us, challenge us, and generate novelty in how we relate to ourselves and each other. They help us learn that failure can be fun and encourage us to explore. Yet, it is worth asking ourselves: when we think about the potential of gameplay for teaching, how can we better consider the ecosystem of unique relationships between players, creators, and those who try to facilitate spaces for meaningful play? If we hope for games to reach their most meaningful potential in - and as - educational environments, starting an authentic and open dialogue of intentionality and failure is crucial. As a community, we need stories, models, practices, and theories of teaching to map out the complex ecosystem of learning.

Like teaching, gameplay is environmental. The social and cultural setting, the ambitions (and biases) of designers, educators and players, and the technologies used all influence the colors, moments, stories, and characters we ultimately experience on our screens. Gameplay is at its most meaningful when we intentionally put play and its environment in dialogue, making space for learning, exploration, and engagement. However, understanding the living, complex, and dynamic intertwining between the inhabitants of this ecosystem and the actualizing of meaningful teaching has proven difficult. It is often the "thingness" of the game, not the persons involved, which captures our attention – flashy visuals and impressive technologies overshadow the unique qualities of those who gather around the screens, who create experiential environments of gaming hardware, and who code and curate the pixelating properties of gameplay.

In this special issue, we want to curate a collection of accessible stories, theories, and methods of triumphs and failures involving gaming and teaching. We invite perspectives from inhabitants of the entire gameplay ecosystem: developers, teachers, museum guides, facilitators, students, policy makers, scholars, journalists, artists, and anyone else who would like to share their experiences of creating and incorporating games and game-based technologies into their teaching. We particularly invite methodological/theoretical approaches addressing the topic of teaching and games, especially those involving, new approaches as well as critical discussions and praxis involving missed opportunities and failures, as well as moments of unexpected successes and meaningful change. We encourage reflections on positive and negative experiences as sharing both is necessary if we want games to ultimately become accessible to everyone, and ensure that we create inclusive learning environments. This call is an invitation to join the conversation.

In addition to the journal's traditional formats of peer-reviewed articles, we are also including a Call for Failures and Successes, a short-paper format focusing on real-world experiences with games and teaching (see information below).

Topics for the peer reviewed articles & the stories of failure and successes may include, but are not limited to:

• Teaching about games, teaching with games, or teaching through games 
• Teaching with new immersive technologies: VR, AR, MR, playful wearables & IoT 
• Games for journalism, activism, public outreach, citizen empowerment, and critical discourse 
• How to design better games & better educational experiences 
• Failures and Success in collaboration between designers, educators and policy makers. 
• Pedagogical strategies for using games in different contexts and with different purposes 
• Gameful Facilitator: Processes involved in organizing & executing game-based events. 
• Gaming related to value formations in culture, religion & society 
• Empathy games: cultural awareness, human connections, and/or community building 
• Designing and using games as a democratic tools towards accessibility & inclusion 
• Transformative learning in the educational environments – the interplay between the physical and virtual spaces 
• Students’ experience & perspectives - individual and intersocial changes in the teaching environment 
• “Failure is Fun” - discussing games as pedagogy & transformation, reaching positive learning outcomes through “failures” 
• Discussions of game literacy, and its impacts on teaching with games 
• Discourses on physical, socio-economic, cultural, and political aspects of game environments 
• The politics of games and game technologies: structures of power that affect the creative use of games for teaching 
• Teaching by making games: game design & game jams as a teaching opportunity 
• Designing site specific games & urban games in education
• Designing and using single-player vs. multiplayer games for and in educational environments 
• Methods for evaluating games and teaching: how do we evaluate the unique outcomes of using games in a plurality of environments? 
• How do we define “learning effects” when studying teaching and games?

 

Guidelines

Submit a title and 300-word abstract to Björn Berg Marklund (bjorn.berg.marklund@his.se), Jordan Brady Loewen (jbloewen@syr.edu) and Maria Saridaki (msaridaki@gmail.com) by 1. April 2021.

Possible formats for submission include:

1. regular academic articles 
2. interviews 
3. research reports 
4. book reviews 
5. game reviews 
6. short-paper format “Failures and Successes”

 

Guideline for the short-paper format Failures and Successes: Please provide in 1 concise page (roughly 400 words) the context, intentions, and failures or successes involving digital games for teaching. In your proposal, clearly highlight each category.

• For context, provide important information about the situation you’ll be writing from. For example, what types of students are you working with? What type of learning setting are you going to be discussing (e.g., courses, programs, grades, public space, etc.)? 
• What was your intention to use, teach, or involve video games as part of your pedagogical strategy? What were you hoping it would help students learn? 
• How and why did it fail or succeed, and what was learned from that failure/success? If you were to try again, what might you do differently?

Please include pictures and media if you have them. Keep your language clear and concise.

All articles submitted will be subject to double-blind peer-review. There is no article processing charge.

More on submission formats and guidelines see. 

 

Timeline

Title and abstract submission: 1. April 2021

Full text submission: 1. July 2021