I was curious to see what Gee had to say about video games, having first read him six years ago in the only good course that was part of my masters in education degree – courtesy of the City of New York Teaching Fellows Program at crappy Pace way downtown in the crude anthill purgatory that is the Financial District. In Social Linguistics and Literacies Gee articulates a sociocultural approach to language, learning and literacy. It kind of shocks me in retrospect that my “preparation” to be a high school English teacher of 17- to 21-year olds in the stand-in cinematic ghetto of Bed-Stuy was so spotty, and this in what was considered a model fast-track certification program. <shudder>. I remember finding Gee very compelling when I first read him – thinking the political implications of his work ground-breaking. So it was interesting to read Gee again, post-meat-grinder, from my later vantage point as a grizzled veteran of the inner city hallways.
hangzhou
Trends and buzzwords are the bread and butter of teacher education – one of the things that people were always telling us in our classes was to “activate prior knowledge” in order to get students interested in seemingly arcane topics. A lot of what we were taught – aside from how to use the right *scientific sounding* to prop up the floundering reputations of schools of education (as if they were ever prestigious!), was pretty unobjectionable – like, of course, as a teacher one should be intentional when introducing topics and always new ideas to what students already know. It is not a quirk of inner city students that they resist learning about things they don’t think are relevant to their lives. We all do it, or at least we should.
But anyway, one of Gee’s points is that video games, like books, help us build a more robust mental framework by contributing to the construction of linkages between first-hand experience and the life of the mind. He also says at one point, and then barely touches on it since in all that I’ve read, that access to high quality video games is a plausible social justice agenda. Maybe that’s why I have this vague sense of Social Linguistics and Literacies as a political book – tossing bombshells like sunflower seed shells on my classroom floor…
