Game-based Pedagogy in the Writing Classroom

Games enhance writing pedagogy because they are multimodal systems with their own active genre ecologies. However, not many writing teachers use games to teach writing possibly because there are currently no textbooks on teaching writing with games and most scholarship on game-based pedagogy consists of case studies conducted by individual teachers. To provide writing teachers with a broader perspective on how to teach with games, I conducted interviews with writing teachers within the fields of rhetoric and composition and technical communication about how they use games to teach writing and what their rationales were for doing so to build a scheme of approaches. I found that writing teachers used game-based pedagogy in order to help students rhetorically analyze the procedural and multimodal affordances in games and to foster rhetorically sensitive multimodal design. They also used games to concretely illustrate theories, especially theories about new media design and critical theory. They used games as an interactive way to illustrate how paratexts and game design documents circulate within their discourse communities. Teachers also used the networked genre ecologies of games as an active writing and research space. Finally, along with reflection, teachers used games to foster critical thinking and transfer about writing.