Developing Gameful Literacies and Identities Among Language Teachers

Leveraging the situated and transformative nature of literacies development, a pedagogy of multiliteracies can offer a useful theoretical framework for teacher education applicable to gameful additional language teaching and learning (GL2TL). Multifarious in nature, gaming literacies entail a variety of cognitive and socio-literacies such as system, play, and design literacies. Intersecting with developing teacher identities, development of these literacies is afforded through social, creative, and reflective practices grounded in situated play and design experiences. Following a review of relevant literature, this chapter reports on a two-week online unit about GL2TL in a graduate computer-assisted language learning (CALL) course designed and taught at a large, public US-American university. The New London Group’s pedagogy of multiliteracies provided the framework for the unit. Activities for the students, who were mostly L2 teachers with a few years of teaching experience, situated their gaming experiences and identities, introduced and discussed theoretical concepts, and had them play, reflect on, and imagine designs for gameful L2 learning experiences. Analysis of their work shows evidence for the development of gaming literacies and the conditions for eventual transformed practice.