Games as Text and K12 Social Studies

Rather than training students to identify and practice the strategies of rhetoric through reading and writing, what if a media existed (and the students regularly engaged in it) that communicated ideas, arguments, and points of view through its procedure, rather than in a linear set of carefully structured arguments? In this case, learning is at least 3D- it includes the dimensions of experience, agency, and action.

What if these “procedural” experiences became the basis for the aquisition of knowledge, the application of that knowledge, but also the evaluation of the “procedure” for effectiveness and/or authenticity? What if students countered an inauthentic or ineffective experience by creating one of their own? —Play The Past.