Middle Schools Across the Country Join for a Mixer

A Virtual Learning Experience for Young Adult Literature Studies An 8th Grade Game-Aloud with Final Fantasy VII: Remake

A Virtual Learning Experience for Young Adult Literature Studies 

An 8th Grade Game-Aloud with Final Fantasy VII: Remake

By: Miles Harvey, Ph.D.

Albuquerque Public School

University of New Mexico

Just because I was not in a classroom with my eighth grade students did not mean we could not get together to experience a digital text that had only been released to the public just 12 hours earlier. I downloaded Final Fantasy VII: Remake, and I planned on teaching it as one might teach a book to a room of students. Instead, I would teach this story through my PlayStation and YouTube. With about six weeks left in the school year I decided to continue the track of learning I had planned for my students, which involved teaching them another full-length video game is literature. I wanted to teach them using the narrative heavy game that was originally created in 1997. This was not a new idea, our class had done this before with Detroit Become Human in-person in the first semester of the school year. My students were enthralled with the experience of exploring a digital text through a video game and then exploring the literary merit behind it. It was no shock that when I did my end of semester reflection student’s favorite experiences were centered on spending an entire unit looking at a story found in a contemporary video game.

Since my students were not going to be in class to play a video game and to share discussions and complete activities, I decided to do it anyway because it is not about having a classroom, it is about building a context for learning for students to learn within it. For me, I had my YouTube channel, Google Classroom, and the ability to stream the game so that my students could watch it for free at home. For those who had the game, they could also play along and follow the stream like a read-along. I treated Final Fantasy VII as a piece of literature using a whole-group reading strategy that I reprocessed into what I call a game aloud. This is where everyone involved gets to go through what the player is doing. I used my YouTube channel to stream me playing the game as well as teaching about it at the same time. While students were able to watch they were also able to engage in discourse about the game and talk about issues and ideas that were important to them. I was also able to reach students from other middle schools around the country who were able to join and experience the learning with us.

I created this strategy from the concept of a "read-aloud" where there is only one book and a bunch of students listening while experiencing the story. Since I wanted to teach a video game as literature, I thought I could use the same concept but I would play and stream the video game for students to experience from home by their teacher. As a daft idea at first, it was simply no different than reading a book aloud to students in a classroom, except in this case, I was able to use technology as the literary vehicle to get students a similar experience without being in the same room. 

We can all be on the same website and we can all be playing the same game together without driving to school to literally sit next to one another for it. We can deliver information across content areas if we purpose the tools and devices of teens into powerful resources (Harvey, Deuel, & Marlatt, 2020). The goal is to deliver engaging and rigorous content while also being thrifty and equitable as possible. There were some students who were not able to play, but they could watch the stream and play a part in the experience. There were students who could not watch live, so they watched the replay on the channel because their brother needed to use the only house computer at the time. 

Students watched me talk about the game and then we played the game together. While playing, I discussed the game’s narrative like a teacher would start to dig into the start of a book. We looked at the setting, characters, plot, theme, and conflict as it developed. I streamed my gameplay of Final Fantasy VII on my PlayStation 4 using the “share” button which streamed it to my YouTube Channel - Miles Harvey. From there, students could watch and comment live or through the replays. For some students who were also using PlayStation, I was able to Share Play, which meant I could “give them” my controller so they could play as I watched with everyone else, even though they did not own the game themselves. This in itself raised audience engagement as everyone loved to see a new player or reader take ownership of the text.

Students then completed activities in Google Classroom which centered around the idea of experiencing a text, so students engaged the text by discussions, writing reflections, and activities that centered around the main theme of the book. For my students, they realized the main protagonist, Cloud, was on a hero’s journey and the planet he was fighting for was crying for help. My students took action and began researching global issues that concerned them and we reported back weekly to learn more about what we were all learning in Google Hangouts. 

References

Harvey, M., Deuel, A., & Marlatt, R. ( 2020). “To Be, or Not to Be”: Modernizing Shakespeare With Multimodal Learning Stations. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 63( 5), 559– 568. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1023