CFP: Revisiting Teaching and Games: Mapping Out Ecosystems of Learning

The journal gamevironments seeks submissions for a special issue entitled, “Revisiting Teaching and Games: Mapping Out Ecosystems of Learning.” From the call:

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?

Submissions will undergo a double-blind peer-review. The deadline to submit abstracts is April 1, 2021, and full-text submissions are due July 1, 2021.