Production Pedagogy Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
While recent educational research has focused on what/how people learn through playing digital games, there is less work focusing on what and how young people learn through game design and critical digital making. Drawing upon our own... more
While recent educational research has focused on what/how people learn through playing digital games, there is less work focusing on what and how young people learn through game design and critical digital making. Drawing upon our own research and pedagogical interventions, this conceptual paper describes how digital gamemaking enacted through “production pedagogy” can leverage dynamic learning opportunities, enriching game-based learning research and offering critical alternatives to aridly disengaging forms of digital literacies instruction in schools. Production pedagogies are premised on the view that people learn best, and most deeply, through designing “networked” cultural artefacts that have use value, and that matter to their makers. Leveraging sociotechnical resources outside of schools, this approach to game design supports the acquisition of meaningful computational and critical literacies – from coding literacies and procedural logic to narrative and artistic competences, inviting students to open the “black box” of algorithmic culture and critically explore how these systems and mechanics can work towards a designer’s own purposes. Learners thus move beyond consumer-level technological proficiency to experience and enact creative producer-like dispositions. This approach to digital making involve learners in self-directed, interdisciplinary modes of situated inquiry, where actors collaboratively research, deconstruct models, and co-construct new knowledge and art as they create, “do things” with, and share digital games - interactive visual novels and critical empathy games, roleplaying simulations and non-linear multimodal narrative adventures. Here, we identify limitations in constructionist game making research and advance production pedagogy as a critical alternative to increasingly instrumentalized forms of 21st century “skills” learning. Addressing the pressing crisis of student disengagement today, we argue that production pedagogy can enable learners to reengage with and drive their own learning, both within and beyond formal educational spaces.