Call for paper: Advancing Critical Gaming Literacies in Language Arts and Literacy Education

Advancing Critical Gaming Literacies in Language Arts and Literacy Education

Gaming is a popular activity in modern society, with a wide range of texts and modalities (online video games, board games, table-top roleplaying games, etc.) each with their own unique communities and practices. However, it can be difficult for practitioners to know how to engage with the complex landscape of gaming in educational contexts. As games and games media have a role in reproducing stereotypes (Garcia, 2017), educators have to critically consider how they approach games.

We seek empirical scholarship that explores the possibilities of enacting critical stances through, and about, a wide variety of games across formal and non-formal learning spaces. There are many relevant contexts and practices worth exploring: from composers leveraging structures of games to craft immersive stories or educators using games as new paths into older texts, or from applying critical frameworks to popular games to using the structures of games to explore characters or tell speculative, collaborative stories. We invite scholarship that is useful for literacy educators working with learners from early years through adulthood.

Successful proposals will describe the focal game or gaming practices, the modality of play, the players/play community, the research methods, as well as the explicit theorization of criticality in the context of the research project.

List of topic areas

Critical gaming literacies

Games as texts in the ELA classroom

Games as contexts for language learning

Gaming as speculative worldbuilding

Social practices of gaming and 21st century literacies

Roleplaying games and empathy.

Guest Editors

Virginia Killian Lund, University of Rhode Island, USA, vkillianlund@uri.edu

Karis Jones, Baylor University, USA, karis_jones@baylor.edu

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Author guidelines must be strictly followed.

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key deadlines