NCTE 2018 Recap - Where are the Video Games and New Literacies?

I had a great time at the National Council for Teacher of English in Houston, Texas. It was my first time, and it was really a chance for me to get an idea of the size and scope of it all. The conference was set in a large convention center, and I don't think I saw many people twice. The conference proceedings for NCTE were over 300 pages, and that was a little intimidating as I sat down in my hotel room Thursday night trying to figure out what sessions I would go to all weekend. It seemed like it was going to be impossible to figure out where I go because there were so many options every hour across the convention center. For example at any given time there might be 20 different sessions going on, if not more, and deciding on where to go was tough. Day-by-day, session-by-session, I found myself exploring all that NCTE had to offer. One particular area of the conference that was pretty interesting was the exhibit hall.

The exhibit hall was full of an amazing array of stakeholders involved in language arts education today. Corporations like Pearson, Scholastic, McGraw-Hill, Penguin, etc. were there to strut their stuff. The sessions at NCTE were centered on the theme of raising student voice. So, many of the sessions discussed literacy practices and traditional literary values I think that had been continuously pressed on the attendee for years. There seemed to be a big push on young adult literature and getting students to be more excited to read. There was also a big push to have students write more to build a voice and to explore traditional text in ways that help build learners. In all of the hundreds and hundreds of session there were only a few that delineated from this focus bubble. It was easy to see, NCTE was again primarily focuses on print-based literacies and a light dose of digital literacy, media literacy, and multimodal literacy. The idea of video games, virtual reality, and augmented realities as new literacies in the English classroom was held down.

Since the theme of the conference was centered on student voice, it would have seemed commonplace to have recognized the need to involve video games and virtual reality as mediums of interest involved in English education across this country, but there was basically very limited examples of this found in the conference proceedings. I found one session with Dr. Rick Marlatt who was looking at research with digital games and literacy. He was working on using Fortnite in the English Language Arts classroom as a place to act out and experience literary events. Meeting him afterwards was great because we shared some common interests and understanding towards our field of study. We both agreed there needed to be a larger presence of digital games and media in the conference sessions, but agreed that it was part of our work as researchers to push the field forward.

The basis for this was on the simple fact that students love video games, and now most adults. I felt the conference neglected to entertain this elephant in the room that seems to be video games, virtual reality, and augmented reality as places where students are spending their time making sense of the world. Many of our students are spending significantly more time in the digital world learning and exploring then they are in the real world like school, where what they're using to learn with is outdated but still commonly grounded in the interest of the student. I am hoping that by next year the conference acknowledges the ever-growing change with English education and the inclusion of video games within its practice. I would like to see constructive conversations framed around experts in the field who have a grounded understanding in the trends with video games, digital media, and their applicability in English Language Arts classrooms today. There are dozens of scholars who understand this concept well, and there are thousands of teachers who employ these strategies today without much guidance from any higher organization than their school or instructional coach. These are the innovators of today these are the teachers who seek to push the literary paradigms of tomorrow in their classrooms today. I hope to be a part of this change as it seems every day the idea of adopting more digital media like video games and virtual reality is becoming unavoidable and more interesting and acceptable by the day.