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Are we Reader or are we Player? w/ Karis Jones, Virginia Killian Lund, Brady Nash, and Trevor Aleo
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Most of us probably experienced a homogenous version of literacy in our English classes: read a book, answer a few questions along the way, and compose an essay at the end about how we viewed a key theme. Rinse and repeat. And in our current age of high-stakes testing and high-stakes literacy, some kids are lucky to ever encounter a book at all; however, those same students are also surrounded by the narratives and themes of English class - in the messages they send and receive and the virtual communities they participate in, the media they consume and discuss with their friends, and in the video games they play. The goal of my guests today is to expand our vision of what that English class could be and induct students into something of an animistic perspective of literacy, as you heard from one guest in the opening: that the narratives and themes of English class are everywhere for those equipped to see them as such. Their Reader-Player Interactivity Framework aims to give teachers and students the tools and confidence to do just that. Their paper, linked in the show notes, is a collaboration between Karis Jones, Brady Nash, Virginia Killian Lund, Scott Storm, Alex Corbitt, Beth Krone, and Trevor Aleo, of which Karis, Brady, Virginia, and Trevor joined me for this conversation.
Unsilencing Gratia: a tabletop RPG book designed to be an easy introduction to collaborative storytelling, usable in a classroom setting.
We Know Something You Don’t Know: a tabletop RPG that invites you into the lives of students making their way day-by-day through the education system.
You can reach any of our guests by email:
Trevor Aleo: aleotc@gmail.com
Karis Jones: karis.michelle.jones@gmail.com
Virginia Killian Lund: vkillianlund@uri.edu
Brady Nash: bradylnash@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
If you're reading a choose your own adventure, you know the kind of dance that's going to happen. You're going to get to the bottom of the page and there's going to be a choice to make and you're going to flip ahead. And if you don't like the choice, you're going to pretend you didn't choose that and go back and start again. Right. Because no one wants to end up dead at the bottom of the well at the hands of an evil wizard.
00:00:17
Speaker
And then for something like a tabletop role-playing game, what kind of a dance can you expect there? That there might be some archetypes or some guidance offered, some world building that exists in the set of the game, and then you as players are going to tell a story within within that world.
00:00:32
Speaker
What this framework does is walk you through what you can expect in some of from some of these kinds of invitations.
00:00:44
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Human Restoration Project Podcast. My name is Nick Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Alexander Gruber, Julia Valenti, and Skylar Prim.
00:00:57
Speaker
Thank you so much for your ongoing support. We're proud to have hosted hundreds of hours of incredible ad-free conversations over the years. So if you haven't yet, consider liking and leaving a review in your podcast app to help us reach more listeners.
00:01:10
Speaker
And of course, you can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media.
Expanding Literacy in Education
00:01:21
Speaker
Most of us probably experienced a homogenous version of literacy in our English classes.
00:01:26
Speaker
Read a book, answer a few questions along the way, and compose an essay at the end about how we viewed a key theme. Rinse and repeat. And in our current age of high-stakes testing and high-stakes literacy, some kids are lucky to ever encounter a book at all.
00:01:42
Speaker
However, those same students are also surrounded by the narratives and themes of English class. In the messages they send and receive, and in the virtual communities they participate in, the media they consume and discuss with their friends, and in the video games they play for hours on end.
00:01:58
Speaker
The goal of my guests today is to expand our vision of what that English class could be and induct students into something of an animistic perspective of literacy, as you heard from one guest in the opening.
Interactive Literacy Framework
00:02:11
Speaker
That the narratives and themes of English class are everywhere for those equipped to see them as such. Their reader-player interactivity framework aims to give teachers and students the tools and confidence to do just that.
00:02:25
Speaker
Their paper, linked in the show notes, is a collaboration between Karis Jones, Brady Nash, Virginia Killian Lund, Scott Storm, Alex Corbett, Beth Crone, and Trevor Elio, of which Karis, Brady, Virginia, and Trevor join me for this conversation.
00:02:42
Speaker
Hi, I am Trevor Elio. I am a high school English teacher in Fairfield, Connecticut. I'm also an adjunct lecturer at Empire State University where I teach English methods courses.
00:02:54
Speaker
Hello everybody, i am Karis Jones and I'm an assistant professor at Baylor University where I teach ah secondary English education. I'll pass it to Virginia.
00:03:05
Speaker
Hi, I'm Virginia Killian Lund, and I'm an assistant professor at the College of Education at the University of Rhode Island. Hey, everybody. I'm Brady Nash. I'm an assistant professor of English education at the University of Florida.
00:03:19
Speaker
Thank you all so much for taking the time to talk with us today about this paper. I don't know the timeline for its official public release, but perhaps we can deliver one to our audience so they can use it as a companion podcast while they're reading alongside
Understanding Video Games in Literacy
00:03:34
Speaker
it. But the title is The Reader-Player Interactivity Framework, asking the question, How do readers navigate diverse varieties of narrative texts?
00:03:44
Speaker
And as listeners can probably tell, we've assembled something of an Avengers-like team to address this topic. And I'm really just curious, what's the story behind this collaboration? How did you all come together to discuss this topic together?
00:03:59
Speaker
It started from, i was talking with somebody else the other day and she said, first I got frustrated and then I got curious. And I think that starts a lot of my projects. um But I noticed that the way that people had been talking about video game stories was often It was as if they used the term interactive. They'd say the stories are interactive and then proceed to say things that I found really sort of broad and inaccurate. So they would say, and you can do anything that you want. There's no real story in games. It's just that, you know, the player just makes up whatever they want to happen. And I was thinking, yeah, that's not really how it works. um
00:04:36
Speaker
You know, there's a lot of constraints on it. There's a lot of variety. There's a lot of different ways stories can work. And so I started to think up, like, how could we have as teachers or just as people who engage with stories, ah like some better language, some more specific language for thinking about, like, what does it mean for us to interact with the story? What does it mean to call a story interactive?
00:04:57
Speaker
um And thinking at the time, I was also trying to teach some video games in my English classroom and experiencing some of the challenges of working with what for me was a new medium in the classroom.
00:05:08
Speaker
And then as I thought about it, I thought, you know, there's lots of other kinds of stories that I'm not as familiar with that. some of my brilliant friends are familiar with and they've done research on. And so I sort of started, I think, talking with Karis and then um we sort of put together like some invitations to other people who we know had done really innovative things in the classroom or really innovative work at with research in their universities. So we could sort of expand and think about this together in terms of how do people interact with stories like you know Dungeons and Dragons games or you know choose your own adventure books? And what are all the different ways in which
00:05:44
Speaker
when we as people read stories, we sort of shape them or have a role in the way that they play out.
Integrating Games into Teaching Practices
00:05:51
Speaker
So Karras in Virginia, I mean, Brady set that up so well. What was it about your research background and the work that you were doing that drew you to Brady's invitation to collaborate on this reader player interactivity?
00:06:05
Speaker
um So, well, something that we had been doing kind of in parallel is also thinking about games. So Virginia and I um lead a group called the Critical Gaming Literacy Study Group.
00:06:19
Speaker
And in this group, we were thinking about how to support teachers with understanding different types of games, kind of like what Brady was talking about, like some games, games,
00:06:32
Speaker
have a set narrative, but some games have different endings that you can choose. And like, how do you as a teacher make sense of it? I i even remember Virginia, us doing some mapping where we were like, okay, this game is similar to like a primer um or like this game is similar to a ah choose your own adventure story. And we were just trying to help ah teachers comprehend the variety of games that there are and how you might use them in your classroom. I'll pass it over to Virginia to keep building.
00:07:07
Speaker
Yeah. And I think in terms of supporting our research, that work that Karis and I were were looking at, um how do we bring not just games, but stories that are told maybe in in a less traditional way, um from what people are used to in the English classroom. um We're looking to bring those in to our research, into practice. And in the same way that Brady said, you move from frustration to curiosity, we didn't have a language to put to some of this nuance that was that we were seeing in the texts we were looking at. And you know we kept saying, oh gosh, I wish there was something we could cite. I wish there was something we could cite that would be a shorthand for people to help them understand these texts. And in the absence of that, we got together and made it.
00:07:55
Speaker
So is it the idea then that there are already teachers um at all levels, K through higher education, who are engaged in trying to um teach interactive stories or bring in game-based learning? Or I've learned this word through through my friendship with Trevor here, but like those multimodal literacies are already in practice. And so was this reader player interactivity framework, a way to give teachers that language, I don't know, to help justify, to help support, to help bring in more of those practices? um
00:08:31
Speaker
Because I imagine the literature to support the business as usual or sort of the typical experience of an English class is pretty robust. You know, um is that sort of a motivation ah that you all had in this?
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah, i think absolutely. i think um making sure that we're both supporting the work that's already out there and offering opportunities for people to step into work they might be curious about with a little more backbone behind ah behind what they're doing, a little more confidence ah in how they could approach different types of texts.
00:09:07
Speaker
And Trevor, what is it about your background that brings you into this project? Yeah, so um yeah I definitely have interests in game-based literacies, um but I'm not as steeped in the literature um as Karis Brady-Virginia and some of the other members on our team. But what I'm really interested in is the portability of some of these models or frames when it comes to thinking about interactivity and how can we take them and um offer them. And i think the phrasing we used was invitations, right? As invitations for new forms of interactivity, even if you are working in curricular context where you're kind of constrained in the textual choices that you can have.
00:09:46
Speaker
So um one of the things that I think was a big priority for us, um and this will come out more when we do some follow-up practitioner focused research um and writing is that This framework ah has something to offer you if you are in an incredibly innovative context where you are you know designing games and creating your own kind of narratives and like an interdisciplinary course.
00:10:08
Speaker
But also, and this is this ah was ah ah something that I was wanting to to emphasize and that everyone else was um as well. um If you are in a more constrained context where you maybe have limited choice, how can you still you know ah borrow and remix some of these ah invitations for interactivity?
00:10:29
Speaker
So like you know if you have to read The Great Gatsby, what if you do a re-storying project at the end where you turn it into a choose-your-own you know, um adventure style game. on that One of our other co-authors, Beth Crone, did something, sort of a game, like a gamification of Gatsby, if you will, um at the ah in some of her research. So that that's something that we're kind of like looking at. So um as ah as a collective, um but me particularly, was really interested in, you know,
00:10:58
Speaker
for a lot of teachers maybe aren't comfortable or aren't ready or don't have the freedom to, um you know, maybe ah adopt this more expansive framing of what it means to engage with text. um How can we at least give them the tools to operate within their limited context?
00:11:13
Speaker
And that word expansive is exactly what was on the tip of my tongue. Well, when you you were all speaking here, because as I was going back through here, I caught that word invitation to in the paper. It reads
Media Interaction and Reader Roles
00:11:26
Speaker
this framework details these six invitations readers take up through varying forms of narrative media. And then you list some of these things.
00:11:33
Speaker
Novels and poems, which i would associate more with like a business as usual or the typical classroom. Video games, as Brady had mentioned here, those choose your own adventure texts, tabletop story games, sort of like a Dungeons and Dragons type thing.
00:11:46
Speaker
An invitation to these types of interactions range from physical touch to mental imagination to reader authored shifts and stories. And perhaps this is a good time to build a bridge into that framework. And there's a lot of different moving parts in this lily pad peddled diagram that, again, I'm sure we'll share with our listeners here. But who can give us sort of the CliffsNotes thing here? Who could ah explain it like I'm five?
00:12:11
Speaker
Since I often think like I'm five, i will explain like we're five here. um i i think um a lot of us experienced texts ah as reading as something in school where there was an idea that there was something in the text and it was your job as a reader to get it out.
00:12:28
Speaker
right? So almost thinking that it's like one of those blocks you buy at a museum where there's like cool little rocks and gems and and dinosaur teeth in there and you chisel away and you're going to, if you chisel the right way, you'll find the treasure that the text has been hiding all along. And our work is built on actually like some reasonably old last century scholarship um from Louise Rosenblatt that says, no, like reading is not about chiseling a way to find something that already lives in the text. It's about a transaction between the reader and and the text or the you know the that you are bringing what you know, you're bringing your experience to the text. and um
00:13:10
Speaker
And as you're reading, you and the text are making some meaning together. um the What we've done with these categories and in identifying these different invitations is sort of helping people understand what kind of a dance they can expect as they're dancing with some of these texts. So if you're um if you're reading a choose your own adventure, you know, the kind of dance that's going to happen, you're going to get to the bottom of the page, and there's going to be a choice to make. And you're going to flip ahead. And if you don't like the choice, you're going to pretend you didn't choose that and go back back and start again, right? Because no one wants to end up dead at the bottom of the well at the hands of an evil wizard. Um, so maybe you do. Karras is like, maybe I do. i don't know. Um, and, uh, and then for something like a tabletop role-playing game, what kind of a dance can you expect there that there might be some archetypes or some guidance offers, some world building that exists in the set of the game. And then you as players are going to tell a story within, within that world. Um,
00:14:11
Speaker
And to Brady's point earlier about this idea that video games are not equally interactive, what I can do in a Legend of Zelda game is very different from what I can do in um in one of these kind of choice-based games that, like some people call some of these games like a walking simulator, where you kind of go through and participate in conversations and and make a choice.
00:14:35
Speaker
like I could spend all day in Legends of Zelda you know picking flowers and ah throwing birds off a cliff if I want, but other games are going to have more guidance. So what this framework does is walk you through what you can expect in some of from some of these kinds of invitations.
00:14:57
Speaker
Who wants to tackle the idea of explaining a visual chart to people who would be listening to an audio podcast? Does somebody want to tackle the, I guess, the big rocks, the big pedals of that for us?
00:15:08
Speaker
Well, Virginia, i think Virginia has been like sitting with this diagram for a long time. So I nominate, I nominate you, but we can all weigh in. This podcast is a democracy. So we that's at least one vote for Virginia. i vote for Virginia.
00:15:24
Speaker
let's start with like that core what what to you is like the essence of that and then we can uh work around the edges to those different components for sure i could talk about the physical and embodied interaction actually and but i feel very strongly about it i was telling virginia i don't know why this wasn't something that i thought i was gonna feel so strongly about but we're drawn to it yeah i was were drawn to so um as we were thinking about um texts and how we interact with texts, there were a couple of big shifts we started making in the ways that we talked about this. So one was we had started off kind of thinking about making a taxonomy of which texts are more interactive and which texts are less interactive. And actually our team had kind of a a big reckoning with this. And we ended up with, um, this, this very different idea that actually all texts are interactive.
00:16:21
Speaker
there There aren't texts that are like more interactive than others because all texts need to be interpreted by readers. But, but, Different texts have unique invitations to interact.
00:16:36
Speaker
And I really like switching from, you know, focusing on the text to thinking about, socially constructed ways or author intended ways or just like you know ah traditional conceptions of what you're supposed to do when you get a certain type of text.
00:16:56
Speaker
um And so for me, the physical and embodied interactions are very interesting um because you know we all know when you get a book, you flip the pages When you get a video game, you have to learn to press the buttons. When you're doing a role-playing game, you roll dice. And ah these actions, the the things that you do, help you to interpret the story and and to make sense of it and make meaning out of it.
00:17:24
Speaker
And... um you can interact with text in ways that aren't intended. So I was thinking about, you know, there's a lot of literature on hacking video games or metagaming or doing speed runs, but also like something as simple as I'm going to flip to the back of the book and read the last sentence first.
00:17:46
Speaker
That's that's kind of hacking your reading experience. um So that's what um really stuck out to me um of the core of this lily pad. um So the next layer in our pedal is looking at transactional meaning making. And as Virginia was kind of alluding to, that largely comes from Louise Rosenblatt and her research on um the ways that students engage with literature and that meaning isn't present within the text, um does not only live within the reader themselves, but comes from the interaction between them.
00:18:18
Speaker
So um I think that that idea that Karis was talking about, we started with kind of a spectrum, um and but we realized that when we started with a spectrum, that kind of puts like some value-laden texture on on the framework that we were creating.
00:18:32
Speaker
um And we didn't want to make it seem as though the like a transactional way of interacting with the text was less meaningful um than you know playing an open world That being said, whether one is reading um you know Proust or playing Baldur's Gate 3, there is transactional meaning making that's happening. right um the The player, the user is thinking about reflecting on making meaning of their experiences as they engage with the text.
00:19:00
Speaker
And obviously there are different affordances and constraints based on the type of interactivity that they are sort of engaging in and with. But we really wanted to put forward the idea that you know no matter how um innovative or or traditional, the the type or form of text that um a user is engaging with, um they have agency and should be afforded agency in the classroom to construct that meaning through the transaction that they have with the text.
00:19:25
Speaker
So again, that kind of speaks to my point earlier about the the portability of this framework and really kind of like um treating the types and forms of interactivities that exist in games as invitations for for classroom teachers to bring into their classroom. And we wanted to really root that in something that was um a lot of English teachers are kind of steeped in already, which is this idea of transactional um ah meaning making um from Rosenblatt.
00:19:50
Speaker
So if we move along the pedal, the next three sections, I think, kind of occur in conversation with one
Narrative Structures in Games
00:19:58
Speaker
another. And this is where we start to get into things that you see more commonly in games um and that are just more obvious to be able to note in those. So I'll use ah video games as examples to kind of illustrate these. Although in the larger paper, we talk about some different kinds of texts that um commonly invite these as well.
00:20:18
Speaker
So the next one is navigating and wayfinding. And this is, ah we're talking here about text, I'll use a game as an example, where there's a set story that plays out pretty much regardless of what you do as the person moving through it.
00:20:33
Speaker
You might have your own interpretations, your own thoughts, your own reactions, but you have like an avatar within, say, that video game world that moves around, but it doesn't really change like what the next cutscene is going to be and what the ending of the game is going to be.
00:20:46
Speaker
So your experience of it shifts in a meaningful way for you um in the sense that you move your little person around, but they're still a pretty set stories. So you navigate and you find your way within that story world.
00:21:00
Speaker
The next one refers to um experiences in which there's a little bit more um and a little bit more meaningful freedom in terms of what you as the person playing and reading that text or that game do.
00:21:14
Speaker
So Karis had brought up like the Legend of Zelda. So in the more recent Zelda games, Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, you have a lot of freedom to shape your experience in ways that really, really, really change what your engagement with that text is going to be.
00:21:32
Speaker
ah You might spend 100 hours doing something completely different than the person playing the game next to you. who might And so we call this multilinear reader player experience. We know that's like a big chunk of words.
00:21:45
Speaker
But that's in the sense that your experience really significantly is different from what the next person's is based on what you choose. And then one level up from that is where there is a sort of set author provided story that changes in significant ways. So we would think of this next level as things like choose your own adventure games or games like Detroit Become Human or Fallout, where there is many, many different paths or endings that can be provided by the sort of official story authors. You can see my, the video, I'm be using my like quote hands.
00:22:22
Speaker
The official story authors, um depending on what choices you make in the game. So we call that branching reader player authorship, where the sort of set story changes depending on what the person reading the choose your own adventure book or the person playing that game decides
Role-Playing Games in Education
00:22:40
Speaker
to do. Like the events of the story will actually change.
00:22:44
Speaker
The co-constructing a story pedal is the place where we're trying to capture some role-playing game ah type texts. So thinking about something like Dungeons and Dragons, which a lot of people know about, but there's so many out there. Karis and I have co-authored one together um called We Know Something You Don't Know, which is a game where you get to play as high schoolers ah and navigate the structures of schooling.
00:23:13
Speaker
And there's so many other wonderful games, Call of Cthulhu, Blades in the Dark, Kids on Bikes, like lots of games where what the text is providing you is maybe some flavor, some ah some text around what's happening in the world. And it's also giving you these invitations to sell tell a story through the mechanics that are designed, the abilities you can have based on the character you create, the way you're incentivized to make certain moves over others, and how the story might be randomized, whether it's through a 20-sided die or a deck of playing cards or a tarot deck or something like that.
00:23:49
Speaker
And that doesn't mean those stories can't have their own canonical literature within them, right? Like, so in Dungeons and Dragons, you could talk to lots of players who've played through the Curse of Strahd module, where they've all battled this evil vampire. um and every party, every group of friends who've played that game have had some touch points in common, but have also taken the story in their own direction. So they'll have their own experience of how that story played out and turned out for for them and their...
00:24:19
Speaker
collaborators. And these kinds of texts are sometimes really hard to conceptualize. Like, what does it mean that like, we're making up the story as we go? What does that have to do with classroom instruction? um And so, ah for example, we've seen really cool things where teachers design games um so that students can experience a story from the inside, or where teachers take up randomized mechanics to help students write fan fiction or like there's all sorts of ways to to take aspects like mechanics from these games to help um collaboratly collaboratively like make your make your own story.
00:25:08
Speaker
um And so we just were really struck by how cool that was and how different it is from, you know, thinking about a book the way we traditionally do.
00:25:21
Speaker
I also want to shout Karis out really quickly for um a lesson on sort of a creating a role playing environment within a traditional classroom that I was able to see when I was taking over one of her methods courses. And it's it's taking the rhyme of the ancient mariner, which is one of the most absurd, hard to understand, laudanum fueled haze poems ever written. And turning it into a role playing experience. And um the students, when they first see the prompt, they're like, what in the hell does this mean or does this look like? And by the time they do it they're like, this is amazing. This is incredible. It yielded all sorts of really great questions um and opportunities for ah for meeting making. So I think that that's just like a great example of um you know how you could be implementing this regardless of the environment that you're in.
00:26:07
Speaker
um So shifting to the final, it's not even a pedal, I suppose this is the lily pad upon which all of these transactions sit, um is the fact that all of the different moves and mechanics that are listed and discussed in this framework are socially socially socially culturally constructed and mediated by the different communities that that sort of produce share um and use them. um I feel like we should summon Scott's like spirit to talk about this because it was something that he really emphasized when we were on our calls. one of our ah co-authors. um And, um you know, that might look like the fact that when it comes to reading literature, there are these interpretive communities of literary scholars who have these practices that they say, hey, here is the way that we think one can or should
00:26:57
Speaker
interpret a text, right? So if you're looking from like a Marxist perspective, what were the economic conditions that produced the narrative structure, the themes, the the content of a text? um Or if you are looking at it from like ah a psychoanalytic perspective, you know, what are the characters' desires and drives? um And how can you use that to sort of theorize um what is happening psychologically within a character? But the In kind of a similar tangential way, ah the idea of a speed run through a video game is something that a community of of of gamers created. that's That's an alternate form of interactivity that maybe goes um against or at least isn't totally in alignment with the creator of that game's vision for how one should interact with it. right The same way that an author isn't typically creating a work with those interpretive communities practices in mind, right?
00:27:53
Speaker
They're telling a story and maybe they're aware of those interpretive communities. um but But I think that ah just understanding that whether it is the mechanics of a game um or it is the practices of literary scholars ah all of these ah ways of interacting with texts are socially and culturally constructed. and that means they're up for negotiation, they're up for debate, they're up for um for remixing and play, which is really what we want teachers to be taking away from this and and researchers um as well, is is how can we think about
00:28:27
Speaker
And take up some of these practices that that may be present in one community um and bring them into the classroom. um and so So just really centering the sort of the situated social and cultural aspects of these practices is was really key for us.
Real-World Literacy vs School Norms
00:28:44
Speaker
that The one thing that I wanted to say, building on Trevor, is just that like we want to invite teachers to mess around and remix these practices. Like think about ah reading that in in the way that you might hack a video game.
00:29:03
Speaker
Think about taking a video game and you know discussing its literary value like a book. like We wanna invite ah teachers to be creative and to know, hey, like you can design the types of interactions that you want to have based on your learning objectives, instead of letting the text constrain what your pedagogies are.
00:29:28
Speaker
Like I'd say that's the TLDR of our paper. Oh, sorry, guys. I was just going to hop onto that to also say, recognizing the things you're already doing are already part of a socially constructed practice. So when I read a book um on my own, I'm an adult. No one's making me read novels anymore, but I still do it because I choose it. And when I get to the end of them, I never...
00:29:53
Speaker
answer a series of three questions of increasing complexity on the Bloom scale, and then write a five paragraph response to each, right? I just don't do that. And yet that's often how we ask young people to engage with texts to perform their understanding for us or to demonstrate what they've learned or their growth.
00:30:09
Speaker
um But that practice of saying here, read this and first, you know, answer this factual question. And now what what do you think would happen um on your own? That's, that's,
00:30:20
Speaker
a norm within the practice of of reading in the context of school. um So we want to invite people into new practices and recognize that what you're doing is already a practice.
00:30:34
Speaker
Brady, I feel like you should say something so we get all of us. Yeah, you you started it off. We got a bookend with Brady at the beginning and at the end here. I also am wondering if we should mention, Brady, that the lily pad might not make it into the final version.
00:30:46
Speaker
No, it's like it's the whole thing Well, it'll still be there. It's going to be a different color. It's going different color. won't called a lily pad. Yes. It still looks like a lily pad. It still looks like a lily pad. We know. If you know, you know. Yeah.
00:31:00
Speaker
They didn't want us to call it a lily pad in the published version. um Okay. who Who are these people? Why do they why do they hate? Yeah. You know, the the reviewers were worried that if we called the diagram a lily pad, The science of reading folks would dismiss it as too juvenile to use in your classroom context. Yeah, too touchy-feely. We can unpack why right that's the case. but ah I am speechless. Yeah, that's kind of wild, right? Science of reading a discourse coming in and ah constraining how fun and playful we can be.
00:31:42
Speaker
particularly in the context of again, I wrote down a bunch of these words like just portability, invitations, the meaning making, the dancing together, right? There are all these opportunities to expand our vision of literacy and they just want to keep stuffing it back into you know some sort of box. um And perhaps that's a good bridge again to build into like that translation into classroom practice because I'm trying to situate it here I mean, not just in the context of a science of reading, but we've seen huge declines in adults and students alike who are reading for fun or for pleasure outside of school, um alongside the declines in ah test scores, I guess, for better or worse, or for what those things are worth. um It just seems like those schoolish visions of literacy aren't really capturing the kinds of things that
00:32:32
Speaker
um adults and kids alike are like engaged with. Gaming is one of the biggest industries in the whole world. right And you're engaging with text and embodied interactions and decision-making all the time in there. And part of me wonders too if this invitation isn't a way to catch more of those kids and adults who don't think about don't think they're engaging in literacies when they are playing video games and don't think they're engaging in literacies um when they're at the tabletop either. And I think something like this actively helps draw ah more people into you know the club of literacy of people who think and talk and model it in these big, expansive ways. And that's sort of a question that I want to ask you all here. Like, why why does this idea matter so much now? As I read through the paper, I felt... you know the power and that um in those metaphors and the analogies and that model that you were building here um but why might this be helpful for classroom teachers to understand to help expand their own practice uh i can sort of piggyback on what you were thinking about i was i was really picking up what you were putting down because i think right if you we talk about like people don't read as much anymore and people don't write as much anymore
00:33:47
Speaker
If we think about like, do people communicate less? do they Are they engaged less with stories? are Are there no stories out there in the world? And I think we would say like, no, there's there's plenty of stories. There's more types of them, at least like readily available in the in the kind of texts that we're talking about than there were in the past.
00:34:06
Speaker
And we might say like, yeah, well, you know, you know, it's they're texting instead of writing. And, you know, we were watching TV instead of reading. And maybe you say, well, I don't like that. I want them. I want the young people to be reading books. I want them to be doing these other things. But that doesn't it doesn't change the world. Like, you know, if it's my desire or another teacher's desire doesn't change the world in which we exist. And I think one of the assumptions that we're bringing to this is that regardless of the way that you then think about like how I want to teach my class based on the world that exists, that we still have to recognize that it exists out there and that there's value in paying attention to and being curious about
00:34:42
Speaker
all the different kinds of stories that our students are exposed to, and then teaching them, engaging them and in these kinds of stories and teaching strategies for thinking about them critically in ways that are going to more readily apply and transfer to the world that exists outside of school.
00:34:58
Speaker
So, you know, we talked a lot about how we think all texts are interactive and we think that there's a lot of interactivity that's involved in reading a novel. At the same time, the way that we engage with not just stories, but information in general um has changed a lot over the last 25 years.
00:35:16
Speaker
And we think that attending to the changes in the way that say social media has become more interactive or news media has become more interactive in the way that you can share it and respond to it.
00:35:31
Speaker
or the way that you're like jumping around from text to text to text ah is something that we need to address in the way that we think about English classrooms. And the way that we've traditionally done that in English classrooms is to use stories and narratives as sort of simulations through which we then think about the world and we think about other human beings and we think about the big issues that impact us. And so when we're thinking about why look at, you know, role-playing games, why look at video games, why think about these different kinds of stories, ah partly it's because they are narrative versions of the way that we're seeing all information media shift.
00:36:08
Speaker
And that if we can teach and engage students in conversations around these stories, sort of at least more obviously interactive forms of narrative, then there's the opportunity to sort of apply the kind of thinking that we, I think, all value in English classrooms in a world that exists outside of the classroom.
Teacher Readiness and Misconceptions
00:36:29
Speaker
you know, for those of you who are working with pre-service teachers, with future English educators, they're living in the world that we're describing, you know, as as young people coming into higher education with the goal of getting back into classroom teaching.
00:36:45
Speaker
ah So do they come to you all primed to think of literacies in this expansive way that you lay out in the paper? or are there barriers that you have to overcome to ah to help get past those schoolish ways of thinking?
00:37:00
Speaker
I always say, like, I feel like I've had the pleasure of teaching pre-service teachers for a while who generally fall into two categories, right? There's the folks who come to teaching, and I mostly teach elementary pre-service teachers too. So it's folks who come to to teaching elementary school because they recognize school didn't work for them or didn't work for people in their lives that they love, and they are showing up ready to like shake it up, mix it up, make something different.
00:37:27
Speaker
And then we also have pre-service teachers who come to us and say, school was great and I'm just bought in to keep, like, I want to keep doing school for the rest of my life. This is awesome. um It's a real short walk for the people who come in ready to shake it up.
00:37:43
Speaker
to convince them that we need to be more expansive in our definitions of literacy in order to both recognize the genius of the young people who are in our classrooms and let it shine, and also to engage our students and make school feel relevant. um For our students, my students in my experience who come to us like having loved school, having seen school as a place that worked for them, um it's It's maybe a little bit more of ah of a journey for them to to recognize that. um But also, once they are spending a lot of time in their classrooms with their clinical educators in their practical experiences, i think they're often seeing you know that there
00:38:26
Speaker
that there is um a need to meet more students where they're at rather than just the ones who are going to end up loving school pretty much no matter what you do, right? Like that, that there's some who are just going to love it, whatever is happening. Um, I will also say that if I ask my students, uh, I often in my, I teaching a writing methods class right now, and we talk about, um,
00:38:51
Speaker
communication and considering audience and purpose in your writing. And I will show them some screenshots of messages between me and my partner. And I'm like, in which one of these was I happy? In which one of these was I mad? And the one that's just a like, okay, no punctuation, like nothing cut there. Immediately they're like, oh man, why like, what did he do? What's going on there? yeah,
00:39:17
Speaker
They get it. They get that there's a lot of thought that goes into the way we communicate, and ah even if it's not a formal essay. My students have not come in necessarily with these ideas for the most part, like coming in saying like, yeah, let's like, like expand literacy and use all these things, but take readily to it. Like they're excited by the idea. These are students preparing to be middle and high school teachers.
00:39:42
Speaker
um But then I think there's another component, um part of which is accurate and part of which is inaccurate, ah where there's the belief that none of this is possible. And I think there's a lot of reasons to believe that it's not possible. and there There are a lot of restrictions on what teachers are able to do and barriers that get in the way.
00:40:01
Speaker
um But I think they also have some ideas about like it's like they think it's like, oh, it's the law to teach Romeo and Juliet and assign the test to it. You're like, you're just required to do that in every school, right? And you're like, no, you know, like you do have more freedom than I think some of the beliefs that they might imagine. And then in other ways, like those constraints are very real. So I think there's sort of a dance between those, the desire to do more and then some of the limitations.
00:40:30
Speaker
I've been working with Dr. Emily Schindler at the San Diego Comic-Con Museum. And so we think about this a lot, like as teachers go into comic conventions or fandoms, what kind of fan literacies do they have themselves? And then how do you make sense of that, like what you're doing um yourself and your own personal literacies and what you're doing in the class?
Redefining Literary Rigor
00:40:55
Speaker
And I loved one of our teachers in our our program ah talked about having two different identities.
00:41:02
Speaker
His Superman identity, like when he's in fandoms, and then his Clark Kent identity when he's in the classroom. And so what we're helping teachers to do is to kind of move fluidly across these these different personas and figure out how they integrate instead of having them be so separate. So that was my two cents.
00:41:23
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that um particularly in the secondary pre-service spaces, There is, and I think our students come sort of with these prepackaged ideas, and then they get really reified in some of the student teaching experiences that they have, that um what is actually an aesthetic argument about what something is ah intellectually rigorous or rich is, um it feels like a cognitive or and and an intellectual argument. but but But the thing I keep going back to is there is there is nothing inherently
00:41:54
Speaker
kiddie or childish about like sticky notes or about like a video game but but there is this aesthetic sense that the only way intellectually rigorous work can happen is when people are sitting with like a quill pen and like a tome of shakespeare um and i think that like again there's just this this conflation between aesthetics and actual like you know what the the actual work is um and i think that um helping teachers see understand and experience intellectually enriching um and provocative ways of interacting with different types of texts is a way to help them see, oh, wait, just because you know my students are engaging with a video game doesn't mean that they leave their literary sensibilities at the door. right We can i mean play any Hideo Kojima game and you are going to have a rich narrative experience that is
00:42:43
Speaker
more complex than a lot of novels that I've read. um ah So you can still have a sophisticated intellectual argument if you even want to bother with thinking about those as as worthwhile pursuits. um And i think that like, that is something that I've sort of noticed a lot is, um is teachers have ah this, again, this prepackaged notion of what something, what is intellectually rigorous or what is literary um that really limits their ability in some cases to imagine otherwise. But,
00:43:13
Speaker
that was I think that was like maybe the first thing I said when we started this paper was I love that we're like, let's talk about Rosenblatt and Bakhtin, but then let's also talk about Grand Theft Auto 4. I love that like we got to do both because too many teachers see game-based thing A, B, or C, and they're could never do that. Or too many teachers are sort of stuck in a traditionalist paradigm about what it means to interact with texts. And they're like, oh, I would never bother with that game stuff because that's not intellectually rich or complex. um so So putting both of those things together, I think that's why we started with the spectrum. right But then we realized, no no, no, these are just different invitations. So I think that like that was a big um kind of point of emphasis in our discussion was was how can we really think about um breaking those things open and inviting teachers in different ways?
Interactive Literacy in Classrooms
00:43:59
Speaker
What we've been speaking to is a world of schoolish literacy that has been sort of built by gatekeeping. And the consequences that we've seen in the declines in readership and you know um comprehension sort of parallel each other to each other here are the result of the gatekeeping, the schoolish literacies. And I appreciate y'all's um expansive view of this.
00:44:25
Speaker
Could we, I wonder for listeners here too, who are curious about ah integrating some of these ideas into their classroom practice. You all are building this reader player interactivity framework.
00:44:37
Speaker
And I think I've spoken to a couple of the instances or examples of um implementing this in the classroom. But what are some of those other on and off ramps for teachers who want to try to do some of these things or take a step in the direction of more interaction or branching reader player authorship or co-construction or any of these other ideas on our would-be lily pad.
00:45:01
Speaker
I can start and say one thing I did was just talk directly with one of my classes about these issues. um So like in a 12th grade English class, we talked about like, we did a little unit on video games.
00:45:14
Speaker
And we talked about like, what's the difference like between the way that this story conveys something or the way that this text conveys it and the way ah that we you know did in the last unit when we read things fall apart. Like, how do you feel like these things differ?
00:45:29
Speaker
And then we we played we chose a really short game, like a one hour game, and played it all together in class. And then we talked about it. And we wrote about it. And we did English class kind of stuff with it. Can I ask, sorry, Brady, real quick follow up. What was the game that you played that was an hour long?
00:45:43
Speaker
Oh, we played Journey. And I want to say it took us two class periods to finish. And it's also a game with no words. So it really like you know kind of pushes some of this, like, how is meaning being conveyed here?
00:45:55
Speaker
Like, how are you experiencing that meaning in a way that's different from you know another medium that we all had worked together with in the same classroom quite a bit? And I will just emphasize for listeners, because we'll have a link to some draft version of this paper. And Karis had mentioned in the chat here as well, that you had so many examples of interactive text, you could have just written an entire paper of recommendations. And I'll say that that comes through even in the, I'm sure that the filter that you had to get through for those final examples. So whatever ones that aren't mentioned here in the podcast for listeners, go to the paper and you'll see all of those sometimes in a really helpful chart, sometimes mentioned in text alongside a lot of these ideas. So um the the paper itself is a great resource for this.
00:46:43
Speaker
I can share some of what I'm doing right now in a class I'm teaching. um So I am teaching a honors freshman seminar at the University of Rhode Island. And the the brief I got for the course is to teach teaching the students need to do project-based learning and they need to do collaboration and they need to tackle and learn about wicked problems, problems with local manifestations, global impact, and no easy solutions.
Student Projects and Digital Creativity
00:47:15
Speaker
um So the way I'm using this work in that context is putting students in the driver's seat of creating invitations to interact. So thinking, how do you invite, if you have this wicked problem and you want to people to think through the complexity of this problem, how do you use invitations to interact to draw people in to understanding the complexity of decisions that people are making? um So I have students who are designing, um they are designing an interactive experience that encourages people to think about ah ah animal testing. um So thinking about the ethical implications of of animal testing for cosmetic or or medical testing.
00:47:56
Speaker
uses. um I have students who are thinking about ah game that will help people think about the accessibility of healthcare, about food insecurity on college campuses. um So they're thinking about really complex problems, but using these as new ways to invite people into thinking together about those problems, rather than just making a PowerPoint presentation that has a very you know unidirectional ah communication mode.
00:48:23
Speaker
Well, Trevor and I have been thinking about this a lot as we've been sharing ah courses and like, you know, i can't wait to hear your thoughts on that. One thing that I think about is shifting away from focusing on text to thinking about teachers as designers of learning experiences.
00:48:44
Speaker
um And so I love seeing teachers design their own games to really fit precisely the learning objectives that they want to have.
00:48:55
Speaker
um I worked with a fabulous ah teacher, Robin Langfazio, who made her own game called Unsilencing Gratia, which is this really cool interdisciplinary unit bridge where um students...
00:49:14
Speaker
play this, they're in this magical kingdom where a sorcerer has silenced them. And they play this role-playing game with a limited amount of words where they have to be like really careful about how much they talk. They only have 50 words to use and they, they, you know, the words can also make spells. So they have to be really strategic about it. And um she connected that game to reading a poem, um The Quiet World, where citizens um are required to only have a hundred words and they have to use it strategically. And then that leads into a revolutionary war process.
00:49:56
Speaker
historical fiction unit um where they think about how the government um makes authoritarian decisions. And so I love, what I love about that is that it brings together um student choice and agency and, you know, collaborative storytelling with kind of these real world experiences, you know, like real, real you know, like imagined experiences of authoritarianism so that they can interpret these texts and later And when I've played this, I use this with some of my my pre-service teachers and something that they took away um from it was when you have limited words, you can either use it for love or for hate. And so you have to really think about how you're leveraging those words.
00:50:41
Speaker
It's like making me tear up. It was so beautiful. And like, that's what we can do when we design our own interactive experiences. Like it it it just is really magical.
00:50:54
Speaker
So my two cents. Another one that I immediately searched for and downloaded on my itch.io account and that I will link in the show notes for this episode. So you're giving you're giving me a lot to do in my downtime here. i've got a lot of I've got a lot of TTRPGs in my back catalog. So two more on the pile is going to, that's big work.
00:51:16
Speaker
Well, I feel like mine is pretty lame in comparison to what Karis just laid out. So maybe you want to switch the order around. How many games have you designed lately? Come on. Slacker. So I'd say that in in my work, I'm focused on giving students ah agency and opportunities to take the forms of interactivity and the genres and the sort of aesthetic aspects communicative practices from their sort of digital world and bring them into the classroom. So, um you know, we had a assignment where students had to pick two or three texts that we read over the course of the year and put them into dialogue with each other and then make some form of short form media in order to do that. So um it ended up kind of becoming an interesting re-storying project for two students who took two female characters in the novels that we'd read who had sort of been marginalized. um and put them into dialogue with each other. And they had them do a get ready with me, which is like a form or or a genre um that my students are are really into. And they did a get ready with me with these two characters. And then while they were doing the get ready with me, they were talking about ways that they could um have handled their situation differently in the novel as a way to like sort of ah reclaim that character's agency. So when they...
00:52:27
Speaker
you know, materialize back into the the text that they that they sort of emerged from, they would be able to make different choices. um So just so a really good example of, you know, even in a class where you have ah a set text where you're engaging with, you're thinking about how do my students interact and communicate with each other?
00:52:43
Speaker
And how can I lean on um and and invite them to take those those practices, those forms of interactivity, those forms of participation that they're doing in the sort of communities that they're already in um and have them use that as as a way, a new vehicle to engage in literary interpretation.
00:53:02
Speaker
so um Not quite inventing a historical fiction branching game, but um really thinking about um what are the affordances of ah our students' own aesthetic and a discursive and fan practices and literacies, and how can we help them live in the classroom alongside, you know, works that we're reading.
00:53:22
Speaker
No, and I think all of these are such great examples at differing depths of um of entry, different points of entry for people who are um could be a long ways through their career and are looking to maybe take some steps in that direction. I think we've outlined a lot of different paths for entry. Brady, go ahead.
00:53:43
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to say, similar to what you were saying and just um riffing off what Trevor was saying, I love Trevor that you were like, I'm doing really boring things and then described like this super cool project and unit that we're all like totally jazzed about.
00:53:56
Speaker
um Comparatively, you know, Paris was pretty epic. Karis what Karis described was pretty epic too. I loved everything everyone shared. But I think something that's important if we're thinking about like if someone read this paper and was like, what should I do with
Support and Resources for Teachers
00:54:10
Speaker
it? Like, I don't think that you have to come and like redesign your entire year right away to be filled with, you know, all tabletop RPGs and like collaborative experiences that you personally like handcrafted for each one of your classes. Like,
00:54:25
Speaker
um Right. Like another way to think about it might be like, you know, I'm teaching this book and I was going to be teaching it. But let me think a little bit more about like the role of each of my students in imagining that world. And are there some new opportunities for this to be a little more interactive or, you know, I've got four days ah between when they make us do this, like standardized practice test in December and the end of the school year. Like,
00:54:51
Speaker
Would I have an opportunity to try something out with a story that's a little bit more interactive? And would that be fun? And I think there totally small, like there's small and big ways in which this might impact your class. And that depends totally on, you know, what you've got going on, what you're interested in, what you've noticed your students being excited about. And I think there's no step like too small to not be worthwhile.
00:55:15
Speaker
I wonder if people are hearing this, they get excited, we'll link to papers and ah fully developed tabletop RPGs. But if people wanted to reach out to you all and say, hey, I heard something you said on this podcast, um are you willing perhaps to um share anything with listeners for how they might be able to get in touch with you?
00:55:35
Speaker
Absolutely. And one thing that we would love to do is have more people join our critical gaming literacy study group. Like if you want to be part of that, that game come join us. And we're coming out with a special issue, a critical gaming literacies, a collection um,
00:55:53
Speaker
um articles about ways that people have been expansively using gaming specifically in their classroom. So we'll, we'll have those examples ah for people.
00:56:04
Speaker
And um yeah, and and I think that anyone can contact us. I know some of us are active on Blue Sky. Some of us are inactive on Blue Sky. Yeah.
00:56:17
Speaker
i will I will talk with anyone who emails me anytime about this stuff because it's very exciting to me. So, ah you know, reach out, tell us what you're doing. If people wanted to join that critical gaming literacy study group, how do they just search it? Is it? yeah They would reach out to me or Virginia and we could add them. It's a it's a Google group and ah we email out opportunities to be involved with things. We have conference presentations at various conferences that will keep people aware of.
00:56:46
Speaker
um And it's just a cool opportunity to collaborate. Oh, wait. Actually, Trevor, Trevor, we have to ah plug HackerStack. Oh, yeah. um So for...
00:56:59
Speaker
For anyone who is attending NCTE this year, um we are doing a presentation on ah what we call Hack Your Stack. So for any NCTE folks, they know that there's this thing called Build Your Stack, which is all about inviting um authors um and to come in and speak about the works that they have um written and inviting educators to you know be engaged in the world of fiction.
Engaging with Digital Media
00:57:24
Speaker
So Hack Your Stack is our digital sort of community companion to that initiative to have educators engage with um different forms of digital media. So that could be zines, that could be video essays, that could be TikToks, that could be Webtoons. And we actually have a Notion page where we've built out a database for educators um to access mentor text, to access research, to access um examples of of activities that educators do where they're bringing these digital texts and their you know interactive affordances into the classroom. um So if you ah type in, it's www. Okay, so yeah, so bit.ly hack your stack one. One, yeah, that's correct.
00:58:08
Speaker
Brilliant. And that'll be at NCTE? ah Yes, it'll be at NCTE if folks want to come and hear more, but anybody can access the Notion page. It's totally public. um If you want to add stuff to it, um feel free to reach out to one of us. um Our goal was for it to be sort of like a living repository of examples.
00:58:27
Speaker
Yeah. And we also have a companion special issue, um including some of Trevor's work, which is very exciting. And um what that special issue does is it provides examples of different types of texts and how you can really engage with it um in a ah situated way in your classroom.
00:58:45
Speaker
And um our vision with that is that teachers could just open up the special issue and read about, you know, eight different ways of engaging text expansively.
00:58:56
Speaker
um And ah yeah, and so we'll have an NCTE roundtable session where teachers can hop around and talk to authors. We had stuff to plug. We had lots of stuff. All the all the plugs. all the I really opened a can of worms with that, didn't I? It's like, hey, and anything else? What do we got? what what Any good recipes? we ah what what do you What do you got on your phone right now that you're listening to? what else Come check out our podcast. Yeah. Well, what's your podcast called?
00:59:28
Speaker
No, I'm not going to plug my personal podcast on this.
Conclusion and Future Directions
00:59:32
Speaker
Okay, okay. Virginia and I had ah some podcasters play our game, um which we could we could plug instead, which was very fun.
00:59:42
Speaker
um Cast of Many Things did a We Know Something You Don't Know playthrough, and they were fabulous. They were excellent. Oh, well, that is definitely now it's on my bucket list. I'll add it to my to my to-do list to reach back out to all so we can we can get an HRP um playthrough of that going. So my goodness, what haven't we talked about here in the scope of the reader player interactivity framework? I appreciate you all for collaborating and putting your heads together to give. teachers a way to think differently about literacies and their connect, expansive connections to the the rest of the world that, you know, adults and kids alike are living in. So thank you all so much, Virginia, Brady, Karis, Trevor, for joining us today.
01:00:29
Speaker
Thank you so much, Nick. This is really great. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us in. Yeah. Lovely to be here with y'all.
01:00:40
Speaker
Thank you again and for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player. Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
01:00:58
Speaker
Thank you.