DE PAULA, B; (2024) Game instructors as cultural workers: Dialogic teaching and intercultural games higher education. Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds , 16 (3) pp. 369-386. 10.1386/jgvw_00110_1.

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Abstract

In this article, I discuss the potential that a dialogic approach to teaching game (design) in an intercultural postgraduate classroom in UK higher education can have to unsettle limited and universalist models to engage with video games. Through reflections on my own teaching practice, supported by interviews with former students who undertook my course in the period between 2019 and 2022, I argue that game educators can be understood as cultural workers, as suggested by Paulo Freire. This argument is supported by the concept of game literacies and Freirean critical pedagogies, more specifically his ideas on dialogic teaching – one that understands ‘dialogue’ as the mutual understanding of interlocutors’ realities – which I argue offer paths towards a more critical and less dissociated games education, bridging the rift between vocational and critical approaches and fostering more nuanced models to engage with games as a global – intercultural, interconnected – phenomena.

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