I just wrote this up and posted it to the group of students and professors I will be working with on video games research. It's been weighing on me for a couple of days, as I started to explain this the other day at our meeting and ended up feeling royally misunderstood. Feels like the weight has been lifted now; I think I said what I needed to. The article I reference below feels to me like the best crystallization of the ideas I went to grad school to work with. Thought I'd throw this out there for commentary from the broader community (I am trying to enable comments herefor this one so we can have a little discussion).

I want to clarify what I was trying to say when I referred to the idea of "available designs, designing, and the redesigned" towards the end of the meeting last week. This idea is very important to me. I believe a curriculum involving these aspects is critical to educating citizens for the information-rich societies currently being born.

The idea comes from the article "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." Jess and Chuck have read it, and I hope I can convince John and Zhou to as well. The authors (the New London Group) explain that they are setting out a new definition of literacy to fit the needs of increasingly multicultural societies and to address the increasing disparity between the world's rich and poor.

On p 77 of the article the authors state a central aim of theirs: developing "a metalanguage that describes meaning in various realms. These include the textual and the visual, as well as the multi-modal relations between... different meaning-making processes.... It should be seen as a tool kit for working on semiotic activities, not a formalism to be applied to them.... [T]he primary purpose of the matalanguage should be to identify and explain differences between texts, and relate these to the contexts of culture and situation in which they seem to work."

They continue: "The metalanguage we are suggesting... includes the key terms 'genres' and 'discourses,' and a number of related concepts such as voices, styles, and probably others.... More informally, we might ask of any Designing, What's the game? and What's the angle?"

It is this metalanguage that I want to teach through video games.

I went through the article thoroughly and developed a list of concrete pedagogical aims to try to make it clearer what I mean and what I think the authors mean. I also included some elements from the book "Smart Schools" by David Perkins. This isn't complete, but I hope it will help:

Students should be able to:
* identify which discourses are being drawn on or contributed to in a text (and by extension: compare Redesigned products or messages to the Available Designs on which they draw)
* identify the source of a text
* understand the text creator's intent (what "the game" is, in the New London Group's terms)
* identify what genre or genres are being employed
* be able to read the text from a number of critical perspectives (feminist, marxist, etc) and genres
* understand the interests at stake in a given discourse
* know how to identify and practice the forms of evidence required by a given discourse
* employ the tools for critical language awareness the New London Group describes on p 80
* employ analogous tools for use with other modes of meaning (spatial, visual, audio, gestural, etc)
* critically understand the ways in which dialect is socially situated
* innovate and otherwise constructively act in light of all the factors described above

To clarify my ideas with a metaphor from pop culture: I want people to be able to see the Matrix. I want to foster the reading of elements of our environment and media which do not generally get read. It is that idea of seeing hidden meaning in the world around us -- the "code" which Neo sees -- which I think is the most compelling and useful metaphor for teaching these skills.

I have also, in describing this idea to Jess at some point, used the metaphor of "lenses," which seems to me to correspond to the New London Group's idea of discourses. If you look at your neighborhood through your biologist lens, you see something different than if you look through your journalist lens, or your historian lens, or your feminist lens, or your Judeo-Christian lens. And what if you transpose a couple of lenses?

I should be clear -- I don't just want to teach these skills so that students can use them solely on video games. I want to teach them these skills in a highly transferrable way, so that they can apply them to any text, in the traditional sense of 'text' or otherwise (public space designs, performances, television advertisements, household objects, clothing labels, etc.) I would be happy to try to teach this using any medium, including face-to-face instruction, but since we're working with video games here, that's the medium which I'm going to have to use.