The adoption of video games as an alternative classroom resource is acknowledged in technology and multiliteracies discourses as a strategy for meaning-making and developing cultural knowledge. This chapter addresses how educators may be informed about strategies that can potentially reinvent traditional literacy pedagogical boundaries and how boys' meaning-making establishes new ways and practices shaping their learning processes. This multi-case study examined the experiences of four boys engaged with video gaming in two different contexts: a community center and an after-school video club. A number of findings emanating from this study, including the following: (1) boys use their video gaming practices for meaning-making and collaborative efforts; (2) boys apply their cultural knowledge as creative innovators; (3) boys demonstrate peer mentoring through storytelling, face-to-face interactions, or in their online community of practice; (4) boys make meanings using metacognitive literacy skills; and (5) boys focus on cultural preservation and narrative storytelling.
TopDefinitions
Analysing is the part of the process in which learners establish relations between cause and effect and explain textual patterns and connections. It also adds a dimension to the knowledge process by extending the need for learners to constructively evaluate their learning and others' perspectives (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009).
Applying involves the learners demonstrating their acquired knowledge and applying it to real world situations. It represents how learners develop innovative and creative ways to demonstrate their meaning-making and knowledge (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009).
Available designs (also known as metalanguages) are modes of meaning based on an individual’s past and new experience of everyday life and how they apply it to their learning. These modes represent linguistic (written and oral language), visual, audio, tactile, gestural and spatial (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009; The New London Group, 1996, 2000).
Community of practice represents an online network of video gaming participants that could involve virtual gaming through massively multiplayer online games (MMOG), peer-based forums, chat-rooms, and other social media (Aarsand, 2010; Steinkuehler, 2006; Wenger, 1998).
Conceptualising represents learners’ cultural meaning-making experiences and thinking or building knowledge within the community of learners (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009)
Cultural knowledge includes multimodal forms of meanings and modes of learning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009).
Cultural meaning systems are actions or ideas that are made up of different cultural terms that are meaningful to people (Spradley, 1979).
Experiencing represents the view that learners’ cognition is situated, contextual and cultural. Learners immerse in meaningful practices within a community of other learners (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012).