Socio-Cultural Learning Theory

Socio-Cultural Learning Theory

From this perspective, consistent with more recent socio-cultural formulations of learning (e.g. Lave & Wenger, 1991), learning is conceptualized as a social-psychological problem as opposed to a psychological one alone. How to educate learners is not seen as how to build representations in the head, but how to engage learners in social practice. Knowledge, from this social perspective is socially and culturally situated, meaning that knowledge arises from social needs, fulfills social functions, and is inherently tied with cultural conditions, as cultural artifacts in the form of language, symbols, and scripts constitute our cognition (Cole, 1996; Gee, 2003). Knowledge is thus tied to and rooted in specific social groupings (commonly called communities) (Wenger, 1998). Thus, learning is not just a process of mastering facts, or even doing complex tasks, but rather, participating in social practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Participating in social practice demands that learners develop identities in relation to these communities.

The issue of identity in learning has come under increasing interest in educational psychology and cognitive science circles (c.f. Gee, 2000-2001). Wenger (1998) argues that learning, practice, participation, community, and identity are all overlapping, entwined concepts, any one of which one cannot speak of without invoking the other. To learn means to engage in a social practice of some sort (whether it be taking a physics test or designing a rocket), and any display of this practice is to participate in communities. Gee (2000-2001) argues that identity and social groupings are central to learning, but perhaps psychologists have rushed to assume that such participation always demands any “community” in any traditional sense of the term. In any one point of time, we participate in several overlapping social groups, or in Gee’s terms, affinity groups. Affinity groups are collections of people who gather around specific practices or tasks. Gee contrasts affinity groups with communities, which, in anthropological terms, include very specific social organization, including (multi-generationality) methods for initiating new members. The main point of invoking Gee is not only to avoid problems in tying all learning and practice necessarily to established communities, but also to highlight the importance of grounding notions of learning and identity in real settings (as opposed to the idealized or abstract).

Adopting a socio-cultural approach to examining learning through a single player game may seem odd, but I believe that it is a useful (and perhaps necessary) step in examining learning through games. A socio-cultural approach expands the investigation to not just look at the student playing a game, but to the purposes behind game play. game play is viewed not as a purely human-computer interaction, but as a socio-cultural phenomena mediated by classroom microcultures and social contexts, including classroom culture. Socio-cultural theory points us to examining students’ goals and intentions in game play, including their developing identities as game players and students, and forces us to consider how these identities interact with learning. As a result, knowledge is conceptualized as tools for doing work in the world.

One way to consider learning from a socio-cultural perspective is through activity theory, a theory of activity (and hence learning) that grew out of the social psychology of Leo Vygotsky who was interested in the social roots of cognition. In this chapter I propose activity theory as a useful theoretical lens for understanding game play in that it provides researchers a theoretical framework for understanding how human activity is mediated by both tools (such as games) and cultural context (such as classroom microcultures or affinity groups) (Engeström, 1987; 1993; Leont’v, 1989; Squire, 2002). Activity theory is a social psychology theory with roots in three distinct traditions: 1) German philosophy (i.e. Kant, Hegel), particularly the notion of the Hegelian dialectic, 2) Marxist historical sociology, and 3) Vygotskian psychology. As Engeström (1999) and other activity theory scholars have noted, activity theory also has affinities with other intellectual traditions, particularly American pragmatic philosophy, Wittgenstein, ethno-methodological research, and self-organizing theory. Activity theory is a useful starting point for understanding games because it provides a language for discussing the role games play within the social context in which they are situated, in particular focusing analysis on how competing forces drive change in within a system.

Figure 2.3: Artifacts and tools as mediational forms.

From a social-psychological perspective, knowledge is a tool used to mediate our relationships with the world around us. Consistent with a pragmatic epistemology (Dewey, 1929), knowledge does not exist independent of use and cannot be separate from how and why it develops. For example, Barab and colleagues (2001) examined how learning occurred in two modeling environments, showing how knowledge developed as a tool for activity and arguing that separating “knowing” from “doing” is essentially meaningless. “We are so accustomed to the separation of knowledge from doing and making that we fail to recognize how it controls our conceptions of mind, of consciousness and of reflective inquiry” (Dewey, 1929). Like Barab and his colleagues, socio-cultural theorists are now, to a large extent, simply reclaiming and developing on this legacy of Dewey (e.g. Gee, 1992; Lave & Wenger, 1991).

Conceiving of knowledge in this way also challenges common conceptions of its structure. As Barab and his colleagues (2001) argue, knowledge severed from its functional use value in the world is not really “knowledge” at all. Tackling traditional notions of concepts, Barab et al. describing how this fundamental unit of knowledge in traditional cognitive psychology cannot be treated as isolated entities cleaved from the contexts from which they arise:

We believe that the treatment of concepts as disembodied entities separate from practice and particular environments leads to circular relations in which meanings become self-referential; that is, their meaning is dependent on the internal structures and relations among characteristics of the concept itself as opposed to relations with the environmental conditions that the concept was meant to characterize… In contrast, we view concepts as intellectual tools that are best understood in terms of the learner practices in which they are actualized and in terms of the intertwined relations among the concept and local environmental conditions. Said succinctly, concepts both constitute and are constituted through situated activity. (p. 52).

If concepts are intellectual tools, then knowledge can be understood as a process of appropriation – the process of coming to not only understand how to use a tool but also the purposes for which it was originally intended (Wersch, 1998). As Wertsch (1998) points out, one cannot assume that just because an individual uses a tool that they therefore have appropriated it: “Cultural tools are not always facilitators of mediated action, and agents do not invariably accept and use them; rather, an agent’s stance toward a mediational means is characterized by resistance or even outright rejection” (p. 144). Central to Wertsch’s notion of appropriation is that subjects not just understand how to use a tool, but that they appropriate tools for specific purposes – they know how and when to use a tool. Building on the work of de Certeau (1984), Wertsch argues that consuming a tool is itself a productive act in that users of tools are always, in some sense, remaking the tool as they make it their own. Thus, learning or appropriation of tools is fundamentally a creative act, an act of invention. Invention, typically seen as a hallmark of Piagetian psychology, is therefore also present in the socio-cultural research inspired by Vygotsky (Cole, 1996; Wertsch, 1998).

In the final years of his life, Vygotsky wrote, “the central fact about our psychology is the fact of mediation (1982, p. 166, cited in Cole & Wertsch, n.d.). Mediational processes are those involving the potential of tools to shape action (Wertsch, 1998). One way to think about the role that tools (including knowledge) play in cognition is using this notion of “mediating artifacts ” – tools and artifacts that shape our experiences of the world, creating opportunities for (inter)action. Vygotsky (1982, cited in Cole & Wertsch, n.d.) explains some of the primary implications of mediating means in the following way:

The inclusion of a tool in the process of behavior (a) introduces several new functions connected with the use of the given tool and with its control; (b) abolishes and makes unnecessary several natural processes, whose work is accomplished by the tool; and alters the course and individual features (the intensity, duration, sequence, etc.) of all the mental processes that enter into the composition of the instrumental act, replacing some functions with others (i.e., it re-creates and reorganizes the whole structure of behavior just as a technical tool re-creates the whole structure of labor operations) (1982, pp.139-140).
This notion of mediating tools and artifacts is useful for thinking about the use of games in world history as it provides a theoretical language for talking about the new kinds of intellectual insights that can be gained by studying world history through the prism of gaming. Central questions for this research project, then, become: How does mediation occur? What are the implications of Civilization III as a mediating artifact? What are the effects of its inclusion on activity, and what learning emerges from Civilization III-mediated activity.

A computer game such as Civilization III is an intriguing mediating artifact in that, when brought into educational contexts, it can serve as a low-fidelity simulation of world history (Thiagarajan, 1999). Civilization III obviously cannot model the entirety of human experience from 4000 BC to the present with any high degree of accuracy; therefore, gross simplifications are introduced. Important questions persist on how students make sense of such simplifications and how they connect game play experiences to the domain of world history more broadly. Educators and media scholars alike need to better understand students’ processes for making sense of their game play experiences and how such games, as mediational means, shape those processes. Toward this end, we need a theoretical language for understanding the potential meanings of games – the semiotic patterns that they make possible – which honors both the complex symbolic systems that constitute the game as well as the fundamentally constructive, interpretive nature of (learning through) game play.

When considered as a simulation, Civilization III is what Marx Wartofsky (1973, cited in Cole, 1996) calls tertiary artifacts, a special class of artifacts “...which can come to constitute a relatively autonomous 'world', in which the rules, conventions and outcomes no longer appear directly practical, or which, indeed, seem to constitute an arena of non-practical, or 'free' play or game activity” (Wartofsky, p. 208). Engeström (1990, cited in Guy, 2003) maps Wartofsky’s notion of artifacts onto Leont’ev’s (1981) three-level hierarchy of activity: Primary artifacts are tools used to directly mediate subject-object relations (such as a computer simulation mediating understandings of world history). Secondary artifacts are used to remediate the use of primary artifacts (such as a Civilization III user’s manual). Tertiary artifacts are imaginary or visionary artifacts that give “identity and overarching perspective to collective activity systems” (Engeström, 1990, p.174). From this perspective, Civilization III is a primary artifact when used as a tool for game play and a tertiary artifact when used to remediate understandings of world history.

Tertiary artifacts – imagined worlds – can mediate our understandings of the actual world, functioning as a tool for changing practice within it: “modes of behavior acquired when interacting with tertiary artifacts can transfer beyond the immediate contexts of their use” (Cole, 1996, p.121. Collins, Shukla, and Redmiles (2001) identify four primary ways that such artifacts mediate objects. Tertiary artifacts can mediate (1) what happens (contributing to a means of achieving the object), (2) how mediation happens (understanding how to achieve the object), (3) why mediation occurs (motivating the achievement of an object) or (4) where-to (motivating the evolution of all elements of an activity system). One might argue that, from Engeström ’s framework, the key in designing learning activities is to use a tool such as Civilization III not only as a primary artifact for game play but also, and perhaps more critically, as a tertiary artifact for reflecting on history as a whole. While I agree with Cole’s optimism about how tertiary artifacts might change practice, in the case of Civilization III at least, there is also the chance that the meaning making that happens within the game world remains there, never connected up to real world events and experiences beyond it. Even if students appropriate Civilization III as a tertiary artifact, there is no guarantee that they will interpret game symbols in the manner that educators hope; for example, students may not spontaneously make connections between the game economic system and the economic processes of “real life.” Peirce’s semiotics provides one lens for examining how this might occur.

Peirce’s semiotics (1897/1985) provides a theoretical framework for understanding the potential meanings embodied in games and a broader language for describing the cognitive processes of mediation that avoids dualisms between subjects and objects, readers and texts, and potentially, consumers and producers.⁴ Peirce describes all thought interactions as semiosis, the production of signs. For Peirce, the sign (or representamen) is “something that stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (1897/1985; p. 5). Meaning might be thought of as the dynamic relationship among the object (that which is stood for), the interpretant (the creator or interpreter of the sign), and the referring sign itself. As Houser and Kloesel write, “(For Peirce) the sign relation is fundamentally triadic: eliminate either the object or the interpretant, and you annihilate the sign” (P. xxxvi). Key to Peirce’s semiotic is the notion that the sign mediates the relationship between the interpretant and the object.

Peirce’s semiotics enables theorists to recognize that meaning is inherently inseparable from the purposes and the conditions from which it arises and grounded in both the objects and the interpreters, avoiding traditional intellectual dualisms between the knower and the knowable by recognizing that a cognitive representation is neither a direct representation of an object, nor wholly ungrounded in reality. His semiotics suggests a logical and theoretical framework for avoiding the dualistic conundrum facing media theorists and educators who struggle with locating meaning in readers’ interpretations or in the text themselves. In terms of games, Peirce provides a language for talking about at least two inter-related semiotic processes: (1) How game designers (subjects) create game signs (the signs produced) meant to embody real world phenomena (the object which is represented), and (2) How game players (subjects) produce meaning (the sign) from game systems and (objects which are represented). Educators using games hope that students will eventually make the semiotic leap of making inferences about the world (i.e. world history) through the game as a mediating artifact that produces signs about the world (See Figure 2.4.)

Figure 2.4 Semiotic Relations in Civilization III

For Peirce (and Vygotsky), knowing and thinking (intrapsychological processes) are, at root, processes of manipulating signs. Although Peirce certainly examined the semiotic process, articulating and classifying types of signs, he was also interested in the inter-relationships between signs and their mediating role in thought and communication. Peirce noted that the product of one semiotic process, such as the intepretation of a text, could become the object of another sign process, such as interpretation of that interpretation, which, when mediated by signs and an interpretant, could yield further signs. Therefore, consistent with Johnson et al. (1985), a semiotic perspective suggests that the successful game-based learning environment produces far-reaching chains of semiosis where players think beyond the game context to consider specific examples, patterns, and relationships between history phenomena. The propensity of such environments resides not in the game itself but in activities that occur within and in addition to the gaming experience as well as the culture of the game-playing environment itself. In short, the context of the game play is an integral part of the game play activity. From a pedagogical perspective, the culture of the game environment may be far more important than the game itself in producing inferences about history. Researchers attempting to examine how game play supports learning must consider how game playing actions remediate understandings of phenomena, but they must also attend to the cultural contexts that situate these actions. Cultural historical activity theory in valuable for such research in that it provides a lens for examining how a game like Civilization III remediates players’ understandings of social studies phenomena without subscribing to a transmission model of communications that denies human agency, assigning the game primacy in directing human activity, or ignoring the critical importance of context in shaping game-playing activities.

If culture mediates activity and thinking, then it is useful to understand how these broader contexts shape activity. Activity theory is one model for looking at human activity in social context. Consistent with the work of Vygotsky, activity theorists argue that understanding the social organization of work and labor is central to understanding cognition. Activity theorists take human activity – understood within its mediating social and economic contexts and encompassing humans’ use of mediating artifacts including tools, language, and one another – as the minimal meaningful object of analysis. Building on the work of Vygotsky, activity theorists attempt to account for both the role of mediating artifacts as well as broader social and cultural structures in activity and hence cognition. The activity system triangle, the visual depiction of an activity system which has been used as a visual representation and organizer for thinking about activity, takes Vygotsky’s basic triarchic relation among subject, object and mediating artifact and adds a second level of mediation, that of socio-cultural mediation (See Figure 2.4). Most activity theorists acknowledge that cultural mediation is central to Vygotsky’s thought and see this addition as an acknowledgment of the role of culture in Vygotsky’s thinking. Activity theory explicitly extends Vygotsky’s model to human activity systems, drawing on several intellectual traditions, perhaps most notably Marxist social-historical approach.

Central to activity theory is the notion of object – that purpose, goal, or need that organizes activity. An object might be a sick patient undergoing health care, a student sitting in a class being taught history, or an historical question which is the object of inquiry (Engeström , 1987). Leont’v (1978) notes that the notion of object is inherent to that of activity: it is impossible to have activity without an anticipated outcome, goal, or other organizing purpose. He also distinguishes among three levels of analysis: 1) activities which communities carry out toward objects or motives, 2) actions which individuals conduct toward their goals, and 3) operations which humans or machines routinely carry out depending on the conditions in which the action is performed. The object of a system, such as teaching students world history, makes certain goals and actions possible, such as students listening to a lecture or play an educational video game. The particular conditions of this action – for example, playing the video game – create specific operations, such as clicking on the mouse, reading books, or discussing historical facts. Activity theory provides a framework for understanding the broad social forces that shape activity, actions, and operations, and how these social needs manifest themselves in local activity.

For an activity theorist, the minimal meaningful context is the dialectical relations between human agents (subjects) and that which they act upon (objects) as they are mediated by tools, language, and socio-cultural contexts (Engeström 1987; 1993). A generic activity theory system is portrayed in Figure 2.5. Subjects are the actors who are selected as the point of view of the analysis. Objects are that "at which the activity is directed and which is molded or transformed into outcomes with the help of physical and symbolic, external and internal tools" (Engeström, 1993, p. 67, emphasis in the original). As such, objects can be physical objects, abstracted concepts, or even theoretical propositions. Tools are the concepts, physical tools, artifacts or resources that mediate a subject’s interactions with an object. The community of a system refers to those with whom the subject also shares transformation of the object; the cultural-historical communities in which a subject’s activity is situated. Communities mediate activity through division of labor and shared norms and expectations.

Figure 2.5: Visual Depiction of an Activity System

Understanding the basic components of an activity system can be a useful way of mapping and categorizing key components of experience. However, for activity theorists, it is not the presence of these components in isolation that make for meaningful analysis but rather the interactions among these components. Engeström (1993) refers to such relations as primary and secondary contradictions respectively. Primary contradictions are those that occur within a component of a system (e.g. tools), while secondary contradictions are those that occur between components of a system (e.g. subjects and tools). In a situation where Civilization III is used in formal learning environments, one might imagine tensions between winning the game and learning social studies as the object of an activity system, depending on whether the student or the teacher is the subject of the activity system. Predicated on Hegelian / Marxist philosophy, activity theory suggests that the synthesis and resolution of such contradictions brings change and evolution to the system, Characterizing the tensions of an activity system, then, can help participants understand and react to its changes.

Activity theorists are centrally concerned with understanding human activity in terms of its broader cultural-historical contexts, seeking to understand and represent activity systems from multiple points of view and from the points of view of multiple participants. It is fundamentally an historical mode of inquiry whereby analysts examine the historical trajectories of participants, social structures, and the object of activity. As Engeström (1999) describes, a critical aspect of activity theory is its “…historiocity, understood as concrete historical analysis of the activities under investigation…” (p. 25). As such, activity theorists are interested in the historical modes of work, what purposes the activity has served, and what sorts of historical trajectories participants bring to the activity. Such theorists typically immerse themselves in contexts, using a range of methods to understand the historical context for the activity of interest, the components of the activity system, and the contradictions that emerge within it. In the next section, I explore two different types of approaches to using activity theory as a lens for understanding learning environments.

A growing number of educational researchers are turning to activity theory as a socio-cultural framework for analyzing learning through participation in social practice (e.g. Brown & Cole, 2002; Engeström , 1999). As previously discussed, it is a useful analytic framework for characterizing social systems within cultural-historical contexts while avoiding traditional knowing / doing dualisms (Barab et al., 2001). While traditional cognitive science has conceptualized knowing as separated from social practice, activity theory avoids such dualisms by providing a theoretically grounded language for understanding how humans create contexts for their activity and how these contexts influence social practices. Hakkarainend (1999) uses activity theory as a framework for understanding play environments, focusing on how the theory allows researchers to reframe the problem of motivation (e.g. Rieber, 1996; Sutton-Smith, 1979) by considering play as a transformative cultural-historical activity. In a different setting, Brown and Cole (2002) find activity theory a useful framework for understanding after-school environments since it recognizes the centrality of context, the importance of goal formation, the discoordinated nature of social change, the role of “leading activity” in initiating such settings and the central function of tools and communities in mediating participants’ experiences of within them.

Unit of Analysis in Activity Theory

In studies using activity theory, such as those described above, the typical object of study is the classroom with broader social and cultural contexts equally taken into account. Activity theory is somewhat flexible in this way: While some researchers (e.g., Barab et al, 2001) have used it to examine interactions in classrooms, others (e.g., Engeström , 1999) apply it to interactions in the workplace that, at times, cut across more varied contexts. Regardless of the context of its use, activity theory highlights the need to capture the activity of interest holistically – examining actors, their objects, their mediating tools, and their community structures. Activity theorists examine activity systems from multiple angles, viewing the system from the point of view of different participants in order to gain this holistic view of the system and to understand the contradictions that drive change within it.

As with other analytic approaches that attempt to capture knowledge making in situ, one important challenge of doing activity theory analysis is capturing how understanding occurs in context (Barab & Kirschner, 2001). One option would be to complete a given unit of instruction and then administer post-tests, surveys, or dynamic interviews (some of which I do). These approaches, while useful for gaining some perspectives on what students learned, obscure others. Students working alone and without tools on tests or in interviews are sequestered from the tools, resources, and social relationships in which cognition is embedded. This is not to suggest that there is no value whatsoever in assessing what students know or can do on their own without maps or resources. It is to say, however, that we need to understand the (lack of authentic) contextuality of such performances and frame our assertions in ways that account for it. In other words, post-tests or interviews can yield some useful data but in no way can they capture the full range of students’ cognitive abilities.

Given that the activity system is the unit of analysis in activity theory studies, most researchers have looked for data that sheds insight into what the outcomes of the activity system are, broadly defined. Outcomes can be understood by examining evolving activity, particularly how artifacts are appropriated into tools, how these tools remediate understandings, and how knowledge flows through activity systems. Consistent with Cobb et al. (1999), I focus my data collection and analysis on understanding the “taken as shared” norms and understandings that emerge in each case (see Chapter III, Methodology). The remaining two sections describe two approaches to understanding activity systems – each tied to a particular kind of context that is consequential for how the theory is applied and what kinds of conclusions one may draw from it – and explores some of the theoretical issues of each.

Activity Theory in Informal Learning Environments

Michael Cole’s Fifth Dimension Project (e.g. Cole, 1996) is one of the best researched examples of using activity theory to describe learning. The Fifth Dimension project is an educational project that attempts to mix activity systems of formal education and play to create learning opportunities in after-school centers. At Fifth dimension sites, educators, researchers, children, and community members gather to engage students in academically-valuable activities. Children move through a game-like maze of activities which are linked to educational software and endeavors; their progress is mediated by a central governing body including a fictitious wizard who creates challenges, awards points for completing them, and settles disputes.⁶ Each Fifth Dimension site also pulls in university faculty and students who serve as role models and tutors for the children, instantiating Vygotsky’s notion of the zone of proximal development by engaging in activities with more knowledgeable and others. The centers allow researchers to bridge theory and practice by instantiating the learning principles central to activity theory in applied exercises and community structures, including participation in the social improvement of the broader communities to which the students belong.

Over the past fifteen years, The Fifth Dimension Project has generated nearly 100 academic papers and presentations (Fifth Dimension website). Evaluation reports show that, through participation in Fifth Dimension, students develop academic skills that can be used across a variety of contexts (Blanton, Moorman, Hayes, Warner, 1997; Mayer, Quilici, Moreno, et al., 1997). In a study of the project’s implementation in after school centers, Nicolopoulou and Cole (1993) described how game play as an activity is not purely a function of the game and the player, but is profoundly shaped by local cultural contexts. The authors show how the local Fifth Dimension cultures were a mixture of the designed Fifth Dimension culture plus the culture of the overlapping institutions. These emergent, hybridized cultural conditions of each setting might be described as a local microculture within the broader culture. This microculture mediates the activities taking place in the environment, crucially affecting the kinds of learning outcomes that result.

When considering the implementation of the game Civilization III in a similar informal, after-school context, several important considerations arise. First, as discussed previously, there is the potential that winning the game becomes the focus of the activity at the expense of reflective play. Winning the game, having an enjoyable experience, or simply the game itself might become the very object of the activity rather than the study of world history itself. One can easily imagine scenarios where players compete for high scores or dominant civilizations potentially at the expense of using Civilization III to learn about real-world social phenomena. One might predict that students might compete against one another for high scores, resulting in a very pronounced division of labor and little collaboration among peers. In such a scenario, cheats or hints on how to win the game might become the predominant tools and artifacts used rather than historical texts or maps. Here, the outcomes might be, at best, nothing more than an piqued interest in history or geography, or at worse, markedly differentiated social status and far less participation in authentic social studies practice itself. On the other hand, one can also easily imagine scenarios, reminiscent of naturally occurring “gaming” cultures, where students share expertise and tips, jointly negotiating the meaning of social studies concepts such as colonialization as it is embodied in the game and, perhaps even, instantiated in the real world beyond. Given both possible scenarios, an intriguing research question becomes: What kinds of game communities emerge around playing Civilization III in informal learning environments situated in quasi-academic contexts? What are the outcomes of such an activity system?

Whereas formal learning environments tend to be highly individualistic, frequently having grade-seeking cultures (e.g. Squire et al., 2003), after-school environments provide added opportunities for collaboration, allowing flexibility in how students are grouped. Given the fundamentally social nature of game play and pedagogical importance of cooperation in game-based learning environments (e.g. Johnson et al., 1985), informal learning environments offer intriguing opportunities for exploring game-based learning. Further, the organization of after-school environments – including flexibility in scheduling, long blocks of time that could be used for extended game play, and fewer curricular pressures – make after-school environments an intriguing site for experimentation. Activity theory provides a lens for describing such aspects of the social order of after-school spaces including the disparate macro-contexts that situate microcultures and the inter-relationships between multiple subjects, objects, mediating artifacts, and social organizations (Nicolopoulou & Cole, 1993).

Activity Theory in Formal Learning Environments

In contrast to Michael Cole’s work in informal learning environments (Cole, 1991), researchers such as Engeström (1987) and Barab et al. (2002) use activity theory to examine more formal environments in order to understand the contradictions in various activity systems and, therefore how change is made possible (and, at times, how such change might be guided in productive directions). Engeström , after characterizing the focal activity system in terms of its contradictions, then develops and shares representations of the system with the participants themselves. In a similar manner, Barab and colleagues (2002) also use contradictions to characterize activity within experimental learning programs in formal learning environments, showing that contradictions are useful tools for guiding the evolution of the learning environment. In their study of an astronomy-modeling course, Barab et al. used trace the interplay between learning astronomy and building 3D digital models, arguing that model-building activities co-evolved with and frequently overlapped astronomy-learning activities. By identifying inter-play between “prespecified, teacher-directed instruction versus emergent, student-directed learning” (p. 77), Barab et al discerned particular contradictions within the activity which then enabled them to help the curriculum evolve– for example, by developing tools to reduce the identified tensions between model building and learning astronomy, by implementing curricular structures that encouraged students to use astronomy concepts as tools, or by developing course expectations that tacitly reshaped the classroom divisions of labor. In this way, activity theory’s notion of contradictions, a concept deeply rooted in Marxist philosophy, enabled the researchers to unpack student-teacher power dynamics and to predict how teachers’ and students’ roles would evolve over time.

Activity theory is also useful for the study of formal learning environments in that it takes into account the outcomes of an activity system – the results of the subjects’ transformation of objects –in order to understand how learning occurs through it. Central to this notion is an emphasis on understanding activity systems and outcomes from the point-of-view of participants rather than from the point-of-view of an outside observer. Researchers do not set expectations a priori; rather, they try to understand the transformations occurring within the given learning environments, regardless of whether that transformation is intended or not. For example, in a separate study of a college Astronomy course, Barab and colleagues (2000) examine how students’ building models of solar systems produced understandings of astronomical phenomena. Unlike earlier activity theory studies (e.g. Engeström, 1996), Barab and colleagues examined both the broad patterns of activity in the classroom and how these activities related to students’ conceptions of specific phenomena. Specifically, they trace how specific tools were first the object of activity (i.e. students’ goals were merely to build models), then became primary artifacts (i.e. models became tools to learn and understand in and of themselves), and then, ultimately, by the end of the term, became tertiary artifacts (i.e. artifacts for thinking about astronomy more generally). Activity theory provides a useful way to understand just this trajectory, one which readily characterizes what happens when artifacts such as games are imported from one activity system (casual game playing, in which the game is a primary artifact) into another (a formal learning environment, in which the game is a tertiary artifact).

Finally, activity theory sheds insight into the import of the formal learning environment on the learning process. Early studies of game-playing activities in classrooms confirm the importance of understanding classroom contexts in shaping gaming activities, suggesting that the context of game playing may have a larger impact than the formal game in shaping learning (Clegg, 1991; Johnson et al., 1985). Researchers looking at learning through game play in formal learning environments have found that classroom cultures, particularly the type of student-student interaction occurring across ability levels, affects how learning occurs through game play. For example, as Squire and colleagues (2002) found in their study of high school earth science classes, grade pressures, classroom groupings, or inter-class competition can all affect classroom activity in profound ways, thereby affecting the outcomes of the learning activities themselves. In an examination of elementary students playing a mathematics game, Guberman and Saxe (2000) find that different classroom ability groups resulted in unique divisions of labor in students playing games with the most fruitful learning opportunities occurring when students of different ability levels played together. Using activity theory as a lens for game play allows researchers to examine these relationships among game players, the game, and the community as well as the divisions of labor (e.g. groupings) that mediate and co-constitute them.

Summary

Activity theory is a valuable framework for understanding game-based learning environments in particular for several reasons. First, it gives researchers a way to theorize how game play is mediated through tools, whether those tools are curricula, game magazines, cheat codes, websites, or game jargon / terminology (e.g. “conceptual tools”). Second, it requires researchers to understand the objects of activity and how they may be very different in a casual game setting, where players strive to transform their social status or relationships in some way, than in a learning environment, where teachers and students strive to transform their understandings of academic content. Third, it gives researchers a lens for describing how games are actually used and appropriated by subjects and how discrepant objects of activities (e.g., earning good grades versus learning social studies versus expression of identity) shape that appropriation. Fourth, it prompts the researcher to investigate how the activity is shaped by different (formal or informal) contexts which, in turn, are shaped by the communities in which they are embedded. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, an activity theory framework emphasizes the socially mediated nature of human activity systems, obliging game researchers to look beyond simple human-machine interactions and recognize the wealth of other practices that constitute game play activity. It requires researchers to consider how game playing is mediated by fan, friend, or family communities both through interactions at the point of play as well as through interactions away from the immediate game-playing environment, such as on the playground, via Internet chat, and during dinner table conversations. Indeed, research on games and simulations in social studies classrooms suggests that it is in such unofficial, off-location conversation that the most powerful transformations of players’ understandings actually occurs.

Chapter III: Methodology

This study is a naturalistic case study (Stake, 1995) of two design experiments (Barab & Squire, in press) in which Civilization III was used as the basis for a unit on world history. The purpose of these design experiments is to explore what happens to classroom culture and learning when a complex computer game such as Civilization III is used as a tool for learning. In particular, I am interested in the social interactions that occur, how students learn, what students learn, and what the role of the game is in mediating students’ understandings. Working with practicing teachers, I designed game-based curricula for teaching world history used in three separate contexts or cases. The first case is a world history unit implemented in an interdisciplinary humanities / world history course for high school freshmen. In the second case, I work with a subset of these same students for a week-long summer camp unit. The third and last case is a month-long after-school computer program for middle school students (See Table 3.1).

Case	1.Media School	2.Media “camp”	3. YWCA After School
Setting	Urban High School	Urban High School	Working class urban after school program in school building
Age	Grade “9 XY”	Grade “9 XY”	Grades 6-7
Class size	18 Students	5 students	10 students
Time	18 hours (6 weeks X 3 50 min class periods)	18 hours (3.5 hrs x 5 days)	20 hours 8 sessions x 2 ½ hour enrichment class
Teacher / Researchers	1 Teacher, myself, paid researcher	Myself, video camera	Myself, paid researcher

Table 3.1: Overview of Study Contexts
In all three cases, I was a participant-observer and in two cases, I employed a second researcher to gather data and help ensure the trustworthiness and credibility of the data and analysis (Guba & Lincoln, 1983). Using Stake’s (1995) case study methodology, I wrote a case study for each context (Chapters IV, V, and VI), which I then shared with both the hired additional researcher and the teacher from each context in order to elicit differing interpretations of what transpired. In chapter 7, I present my conclusions that cut across all three cases. This study is not a controlled experimental study, nor is it a direct comparison of how learning occurs in each setting. Rather, the purpose of this study is to understand how learning occurs in each context and to generate “petite generalizations” (Stake, 1995) that can have both experience-distant and experience-near relevance (Barab & Squire, in press; Geertz, 1983; Stake, 1995). Restated, I generate assertions about learning and instruction through game play as it occurs in these three contexts – assertions that may then be useful for designing and understanding other contexts. Consistent with qualitative research in general (e.g. Guba & Lincoln, 1983) and design research methodologies (e.g. Barab & Squire, in press) in particular, a second intent of this research is to add to the emerging body of theory on designing game-based learning environments. Specifically, my research questions include the following:

1. 
   What practices emerge when games are brought into formal learning environments? In particular, how do gaming practices (e.g., competition, learning through failure) intersect with the practices and culture of formal schooling?
   
2. 
   How do games engage players and operate as motivating learning contexts?
   
3. 
   How does learning occur through game play? Specifically, how does playing Civilization III remediate students’ understandings of history?
   
4. 
   What are the pedagogical potentials of using games in social studies, specifically in history classrooms?
   
5. 
   How should we think about the role of games in a formal learning environment, and how might they best be leveraged to support learning in such contexts?
   
   
   

In this chapter, I outline my approach to case-based design-based research and provide a description and analysis of the affordances of Civilization III as a tool for learning world history. Next, I briefly describe the three specific contexts of my research and outline the data collection procedure used within them. I then present my analysis procedures.
Design Experiments as a Research Framework

Over the past decade, a growing number of learning scientists have been adopting what have come to be known as “design experiment methodologies” as a way of developing research findings which not only uncover and extend theoretical issues but also result in tangible educational programs or artifacts which can be used in other contexts (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1992). From this design perspective, the validity of research results is determined not only through traditional validation procedures but also through examining the consequences of putting the theories and ideas it generates into subsequent use. Elsewhere, I have argued that this framework, despite the fact that it may seem foreign or novel, is in line with contemporary thinking in validation research and is grounded in the widely known pragmatic inquiry of Peirce and Dewey (Barab & Squire, in press).

Designing Contexts for Learning

Theoretically, design experiments emanate from the growing acknowledgement of the role of context in cognition (e.g. Barab, et al., 1999; Cole, 1996; Gee, 1992; Hutchins, 1995; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Salomon, 1993; Wertsch, 1998). One can think about how context is part and partial to cognition in several ways: Context provides the language by which we organize and formulate thoughts (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Cultural contexts provide scripts that organize our behavior in social settings and tools that remediate thoughts (Cole, 1996; Wertsch, 1998). Physical tools open up possibility spaces and therefore remediate our relationships with objects (Salomon, 1993; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1998) as well as the contours of the possibility spaces in which we operate (Barab et al., 1999). Faced with the challenge of understanding (such complex, distributed, and multifaceted) cognition in context, researchers have been adopting and adapting a variety of naturalistic research methodologies to better understand how humans perform in complex social and material settings. Design experiments and design-based research strategies are a family of methodologies that fall within this approach to understanding cognition.

Merely understanding cognition, however, is rarely the end goal of our work as educational researchers. More commonly, we have transformative agendas where our goal is to not just understand a community or culture as an ethnographer might but rather to create social change. Education is an applied field and learning scientists typically bring practical goals to their research – for example, seeking to better engage students in the making of science, hoping to create real online communities for professional development, or struggling to create history classrooms that confront students pre-existing beliefs about race, gender, or class. Such “research with practical intent” is, by definition, design research, which has several potential benefits: research results that take the role of social context into account and therefore have greater potential for influencing educational practice, tangible products and programs that can be adopted elsewhere, and conclusions validated through the consequences of their use, providing consequential evidence for validity (Messick, 1992).

A core characteristic of design experiments is their pragmatic orientation, consistent with the pragmatic epistemology of Dewey (1938) and Pierce (1877) (Barab & Squire, in press). Design experiments attempt to “develop a class of theories about both the process of learning and the means that are designed to support that learning, be it the learning of individual students, of a classroom community, of a professional teaching community, or of a school or school district viewed as an organization” (Barab & Squire, p. 10). Design experiments are interventionist in that they attempt to instantiate and test theoretical conjectures within classroom contexts. They are not only confirmatory but also explore the limitations of the findings they produce as well. As Cobb et al. (2003) highlight, they are iterative – never complete but in constant revision and reimplementation – and, as such, are crucial to the development and refinement of instructional designs – instructional interventions and theories geared at understanding not just which instructional interventions are useful but also the conditions under which they work as well. Again, design experiments are definitely pragmatic, based on a sense that, if a theoretically based instructional design is not working for the researcher or the teacher, then it lacks validity.

Such design-based approaches to research also produce several challenges for educational researchers. How do we account for the role of the researcher in the design experiment and the associated threats to validity that they bring with them? If the researcher is intimately involved in the conceptualization, design, development, implementation, and investigation of a pedagogical approach, how can we ensure the findings are credible, trustworthy, and valid? How involved should researchers be? For example, those working in schools often face difficult ethical choices. Do they stand idly by and watch a teacher struggle to use their curricula or should they intervene in order to provide additional support? Should they share information on struggling students with teachers in order to enable them to change instruction accordingly, or should they take a “hands-off” approach in order to minimize their influence on to-be-studied phenomena?

Cobb and colleagues (Cobb, et al., 1999) describe an approach they call “teaching experiments” in which researchers enter an instructional context with specific goals, manipulating the local context to achieve the desired ends. They describe this method as a recursive process of theory building and instructional interventions. Rather than remain detached from the research context, researchers are implored to intercede where possible, using interventions as opportunities to examine core theoretical issues, to improve the instruction when necessary, or simply to explore the learning taking place in greater depth. While skeptics contend that such interventions “taint” the research context, Cobb and his colleagues argue that effective instructional models develop through such interventions and their subsequent refining and testing. Design experiments allow a researcher to identify how an instructional design fails to meet classroom needs, to make the necessary changes in the design, and then to examine how those design changes actually play out in the classroom. Thus, data about how teachers or researchers modify instructional designs are valuable data sources for the development and refinement of theory.

Such a flexible approach is particularly useful in an exploratory study such as the one presented here. I am interested in how a game such as Civilization III can be used as a tool for learning in world history classrooms, but, in studying this phenomenon, there are multiple unknowns, including (but not limited to) the affordances of the game as a tool for learning, the trajectory of even one students’ understanding of history throughout the game, or simply how a given group of students and their teacher will react to its use in formal instruction in the first place. There are few naturally occurring opportunities for studying instruction based on a game such as Civilization III. Although a growing number of teachers have imported similar simulation games into their classrooms, finding instruction in which the game is taken seriously – for example, where the teacher is using the kind of outside materials used within authentic gaming communities, where peer collaboration is not only tolerated but promoted, or where the game is used as a tool for learning rather than a reward for good behavior or a baby-sitter for students with time on their hands – is somewhat difficult. In spring of 2002, I found two teachers interested in using Civilization III in the classroom. Because using such a game for instruction was new to both, we collaboratively decided to brainstorm a variety of instructional approaches and then intervene by changing the activity as deemed necessary or in the students’ best interest. Cobb’s design/teaching experimental methodology was, therefore, especially appropriate.

Because refinement and reiteration is at the core of the design research enterprise, researchers working under this paradigm are constantly and iteratively designing and testing new instructional strategies and new theories, using sites of change as data sources toward understanding theoretical and practical issues. For Cobb and colleagues (2003), theory is a tool designed to do practical work – namely, to illuminate pedagogical issues and guide practice. Yet, as Jenkins, Squire, & Tan (in press) argue, design research can take up different forms at differing points in the design process. At times, researchers might build prototypes; at others, they might do direct comparisons in order to tease out differences in instructional approaches. Because of the paucity of theoretically grounded research on digital games in social studies classroom, this study is necessarily an exploratory study. Because so little is actually known about what variables might be important in an activity such as this one (other than the social interactions surrounding game play) or which joints such an activity should be carved at (other than what activity theory, a priori, suggests) or even what instruction designed to capitalize on the affordances of a game such as Civilization III might possibly look like in the fist place, I chose to prototype a reasonable instructional design using Civilization III as the basis of an instructional unit on world history, implement it in three disparate contexts, and then examine the shape and trajectory of the learning and activities which emerged in all their messiness. In so doing, I seek to uncover the theoretical and practical issues behind using a complex commercial computer game such as Civilization III to teach world history and to suggest some models for thinking about how Civilization III can be used to support learning.

Role of the Researcher

In each case study, I participated as both a researcher and an instructor in a manner consistent with the design/teaching experiment approach. Although the teachers at both sites (The Media School and the YWCA) had agreed to hold classes based on Civilization III, in each case, it quickly became apparent that, due to the teachers’ time constraints and minimal experience with the game itself, I would need to play a central and active role in organizing the unit and shaping the activity in situ.

⁷ Given that participants in the first two cases would not allow audio- or videotaping and the fact that I had to serve as both data collector and instructor at one, I hired an additional trained researcher to help with data collection and analysis.⁸ She attended each class but one throughout the first two cases (at both the Media School and the YWCA). During the Media Summer case, I was the only researcher present; however, I wide-angle videotaped each class period, capturing all student activity within the classroom.⁹

Each researcher played a distinct role during the activities, oftentimes on opposite sides of the room. I directed activity, opening and closing class, giving just-in-time lectures, prompting reflection, and handling class management issues (these activities are described in greater depth in each case, presented in Chapters IV, V, and VI respectively). During each session, I took notes, when possible, on my observations. The second researcher played a more consistent observer role, taking field notes on all classroom activities and interactions, attending especially to individual actions, social exchanges, and broader patterns of activity within the classroom that I might likely miss given my active role in the class. For example, she took field notes on less engaged students and patterns of interaction between myself (as instructor) and students in the class (e.g., which students I interacted with most frequently and when). We also used log sheets to augment our data (see Appendix C) in all but the YWCA case where following each student’s game play was much easier and log sheets were therefore not necessary. After each session, we met (along with the students’ regular teacher, when possible) to compile our observations, explicate our shorthand field notes, and discuss/debate what transpired in class.

Contexts

Case Study 1. Civilization III in a High School Humanities Enrichment Class

In the first case, I created and enacted a world history unit using Civilization III during a six-week (three times per week, 45 minutes per class) period in a high school classroom at a Media and Technology Charter School designed to cater to inner-city Boston youth. Eighteen students participated in the study. Participants played Civilization III as a part of an interdisciplinary course on the study of human cultures. Students also read supplementary articles, discussed issues in class, consulted maps, globes, and timelines, and presented what they learned about social studies through playing the game to their peers. The school does not specifically teach world cultures or world geography, instead folding social studies into humanities and technology courses.

This site was selected because the school regularly uses emerging media in instruction and is committed to using project-based learning approaches where appropriate. Although I was not informed of this until mid-way through the unit, the class was comprised entirely of students who had failed ninth grade the previous year and were being held back for a year before advancing to tenth grade. Roughly 75% of the students were African-American, 15% were Latino, and 10% were of European descent.

The unit was designed in collaboration with partnering teachers. Initially, we planned to have students develop research questions that they would collaboratively answer in groups of 1-3 students. The original unit plan also included a number of reading and discussion activities. However, most of these design features were abandoned early in the unit. The complexity of Civilization III and a host of other factors (detailed in Chapter IV) caused us to abandon this approach early on.

Case Study II. Civilization III in a Summer Media Studies Camp

In the second case, I created an after-school camp program for students in the Media School (Case I) who enjoyed playing Civilization III and wanted to continue playing into the summer. Although not formally tied to the instruction during the school year, most students in the school attended a summer camp of some form, all of which involved media of some form, ranging from recording songs to photography. Our camp focused on having students investigate the potentials of Civilization III for learning history. The one-week camp met every day for 3.5 hours each day. Five students, all from Case I, attended. The students’ final deliverable was to deliver a ten-minute presentation to their peers about what they learned about history through the game. Students in other camps made similar presentations.

Case Study III. Civilization in an After-School Computer Club

In the third case study, I again created and enacted a world history unit using Civilization III during a five-week period in a Boston-area YWCA after- school “enrichment class” that served a multi-ethnic working class community in suburban Boston. Twelve students volunteered to participate in the unit with the understanding that they would be playing an educational game that would help them become more familiar with technology, although only nine students attended regularly. Consistent with previous research in informal learning environments (Nicolopoulou & Cole, 1993), this after-school community of Civilization III players was designed with the expressed purpose of supporting "constructive play" rather than rigorous academic activity. The class was quite diverse; there were African-American, Haitian-American, Chinese-American, Latino, Creole, and a variety of European-descent students in the class. One third of the students were from European-American households, one third were bilingual, and most students identified themselves as belonging to several ethnic groups.

This site was chosen both as a convenience sample and because after school centers provide unique opportunities for studying the intersection between game playing and learning in an informal context. Informal contexts are important since, in such settings, experimental pedagogical techniques can be employed with less pressure to conform to state or national content standards as well or local constraints (Nicolopoulou & Cole, 1993). Detailed information on how this case developed is included in the Case III (see Chapter VI).

Rather than describe each curricular unit as it was initially designed, I treat the activities that emerged as historical phenomena, something that is not determined a priori and can only be understood through enactment (See also Squire, et al., 2003). In order to shed light on what emerged in each setting, I next describe the properties and affordances of Civilization III itself, which obviously provided the fulcrum about which student and teacher (inter)action centered at each site. This description and analysis is intended to provide a backdrop against which the emergent classroom practices at each location (as described subsequently in each case study) might be understood.

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