Playful Pedagogy in the Pandemic: Pivoting to Game-Based Learning

In the wake of COVID-19, educational technology adoption has increased, with corporations commodifying student engagement through gamification. This book seeks to create a space for playful learning in higher education, emphasizing the need for a pedagogy of care and engagement and collaboration with students to reimagine education outside of prescriptive technology. Gaming, once seen as a potential tool for rethinking educational technology, is now associated with challenges such as misogyny, white supremacy, and misinformation. The book proclaims the urgent need to find a space for playful learning and to find new inspiration in personal gaming and interventions to restructure the corporatized, surveilling classroom of a gamified world.

Format: Hardback
Length: 150 pages
Publication date: 26 August 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Educational technology adoption has surged in the wake of COVID-19, with corporations commodifying student engagement through makeshift packages marketed as gamification. This book aims to create a space for playful learning in higher education, emphasizing the need for a pedagogy of care and engagement, collaboration with students, and reimagining education beyond prescriptive educational technology.

Virtual learning has transformed the course management system into the classroom, while business platforms for streaming video have become awkward substitutes for lectures and discussions. Gaming, once seen as a potential tool for rethinking our relationship with educational technology, has now become intertwined with challenges such as misogyny, white supremacy, and misinformation. The initial promise of games-based learning seems to have faded, lingering only as gamification, a form of structuring that creates mechanisms and incentives but limits opportunities for play.

As higher education faces an unprecedented crisis, this book calls for the urgent need to find a space for playful learning and draw inspiration from personal gaming platforms and interventions. It advocates for restructuring the corporatized, surveilling classroom of a gamified world and offers a model of hope for a future driven by new tools and platforms for personal, experimental game-making as intellectual inquiry.

Through an in-depth analysis of the challenges and opportunities presented by pandemic pedagogy, this book reveals the conditions that led to the widespread failure of adoption of games-based learning and presents a model of hope for a future driven by new tools and platforms for personal, experimental game-making as intellectual inquiry.

Weight: 460g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032251264