WEBINAR DESCRIPTION
“Gaming Stories From Our Classrooms: Perspectives on Critical Practices” focuses on educator storytelling around game implementation in school spaces. A panel of teachers with a variety of experiences, from novice to expert (noobs to pro), join researchers from the Literacy Research Association's Critical Gaming Literacies Study Group for this one hour event. Panelists will discuss affordances and constraints of using gaming in their classrooms, followed by facilitated breakout rooms for participant discussion, including topics such as: safety and consent, scaffolding roleplaying systems for various learners, and engaging with video-games as narratives. After the webinar, participants will be invited to share their perspectives and curiosities about gaming via a survey. The first 50 survey respondents will be gifted with a free ebook “Power Up Your Classroom”!
DATE: Thursday, August 24, 2023
TIME: 4pm EST
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Panelist Bios
Kenyada Pretlow is a teacher at the ECU Community School (lab school). She has 22 years of teaching experience from Pre-k- 5th grade. As an educator she believes in the power of games to increase engagement in the classroom.
Sarah Blood is an agriculture teacher in the Schenectady City School District in New York State with over 15 years of experience related to all aspects of agriculture and education issues and solutions. She is studying teacher agency and critical pedagogies in the Ed.D. program at Empire State University.
Nathan Lawrence is an English Teacher at Commerce High School in Commerce, Georgia. He has been playing role playing games - both digitally and in pen and paper - for the past two decades. He is the author of Colony: SALEM, a TTRPG about suspicion, faith, technomancy and survival on the untamed edges of space. He lives in Athens, Georgia with his wife and two perfect cats.
Peter Reitz is currently in their sixteenth year teaching English at Commerce High School in Commerce, Georgia. They've been playing video games and tabletop RPGs their entire life (including writing three games!). They're also obsessed with cooking shows, mythology, faeries, Old Testament angels, and Southern Gothic literature.
Dr. Darian Thrailkill is a teacher educator and researcher who has studied the use of video games in classroom contexts. As a lifelong gamer, Darian is committed to exploring the affordances and constraints of using games to tell stories in schools.
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Breakout Room Facilitator Bios
Karis Jones (Ph.D.)Â is Assistant Professor of English Language Arts for the School for Graduate Studies at SUNY Empire State College. As a teacher educator, literacy consultant, public humanities scholar, and community activist, she studies issues of equitable literacies learning across disciplinary, fandom, and gaming spaces.
Hannah Dietrich, Lecturer of Writing at University of Houston Clear Lake, earned her Doctorate of Education in Literacy at Sam Houston State University. Her research centers on the impact of teacher discourse, and she is excited to continue studying discourse in gaming. She and her husband own Cave Gaming, a TTRPG Micropublisher.
Virginia Killian Lund, PhDÂ is an Assistant Professor of English Language Arts in the College of Education at the University of Rhode Island. Her scholarship focuses on the literacies, learning, and identities of young people as they compose across contexts and within multiple modalities, particularly in technology-enhanced environments.Â
Mica Macrae Edmiston is a PhD student in the English / Folklore program at the Ohio State University. They have also worked with young people as a substitute teacher, tutor, and child care provider. They have been telling and playing stories pretty much since they could understand the concept, are an avid gamer, reader, writer, sport and historical fencer, a petter of moss and of animal friends, a drinker of tea, a picker-upper of feathers and odd rocks, and a fan of thunderstorms.