Abstract
Gamification is rapidly becoming an established pedagogical approach in higher education, especially since shifting to online teaching during the pandemic. Following a research gap in the socio-material literature, this chapter examined gamification practice using poststructuralist readings of lecturers' professional subjectivities. It reports on a data set from a larger qualitative study conducted in a higher education institution in the Middle East, where Kahoot! is frequently used for course review. Semi-structured interviews with nursing division lecturers and live observations of their online lectures were conducted. The socio-material analysis revealed four themes that highlight how narrative acts as well as how material affordances and constraints are enrolled into lecturer subject positioning, with three categories reinforcing professional subjectivities and the final subverting their ideational positioning. Contributing to the growing body of socio-material scholarship, the chapter concludes with some recommendations and fruitful avenues for further research in this field.
TopMain Focus Of The Chapter
Despite growing scholarly attention to materiality’s constitutive role in occupational contexts (Fenwick & Edwards, 2011), socio-material studies in higher education have predominantly overlooked the socio-material conditions which fashion professional subjectivities (Brown, 2019) or have touched upon them implicitly without focused analysis (Mulcahy, 2011). Marrying the imbrication metaphor and the poststructuralist framing of subjectivity, this chapter reports on research conducted in a Middle Eastern university with lecturers in the nursing division, to reveal how the socio-material imbrications arising through gamification produce lecturer subjectivities. The focused tool is Kahoot! – a popular gamification platform for creating and launching review quizzes.
This chapter is organized as follows. First, the theoretical lens of socio-materiality is discussed and Leonardi’s (2013) guiding metaphor of imbrication is explicated. The chapter then moves on to a conceptualization of the lecturer’s professional subjectivity, before reviewing the Kahoot! gamification literature. The empirical locale, data collection, and data analysis procedures are then described. In the exposition of findings, four key themes resulting from the socio-material imbrications of gamification practice are presented. These themes highlight the narrative acts and material elements that are enrolled into lecturer subject positioning, with three categories reinforcing lecturer subjectivities and the final subverting their ideational positioning. The chapter ends with a discussion of the findings before advancing conclusions and recommendations for educators mobilizing gamification in their pedagogy.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Professional Subjectivity: How individuals situate and position themselves in their occupations through discourse and negotiations with the material, similar to the concept of professional identity.
Kahoot: A popular educational technology platform that allows teachers to create and share interactive quizzes, surveys, and discussions with their students.
Gamification: The use of game elements, such as competition, points, and scoreboards in educational activities.
Human Agency: The ability to act, make choices, and set intentions.
Imbrication: The layering and interweaving of human and non-human agencies.
Material Agency: The capability of an artifact and its capacity to act on its own, outside of human intervention.
Sociomateriality: A theoretical perspective that examines how social and material elements mutually shape and constrain each other in the production of meaning and knowledge.