Queen's Master of Education student Kyle Raymond joins us to talk about how and why video games should be part of the classroom. Kyle provides practical tips on logistics and ways to make it work with limited resources as well as ideas on how to integrate video games into lessons.
Kyle Raymond is a passionate educator pursuing a Master of Education (MEd) at Queen's University, working with Dr. Claire Ahn. He is working on his thesis titled, “Flowering Narratives: The Integration of Video Games in ELA Classrooms to Cultivate Learning about Environmentalism." He also holds a Bachelor of Education (BEd) from Queen's. In addition to his academic pursuits, Kyle has been a music instructor, teaching guitar, and has served as a remote teacher and tutor for the past few years.
Kyle's research focuses on the video game Flower.
Transcript
Theme Song: Talking about innovation, in-teaching and education, popular podagogy. Discussions that are topical and something philosophical, popular podagogy. Popular podagogy.
Chris Carlton: Hi there. Thanks for joining us and welcome to another episode of Popular Podagogy, where we try to bring big ideas in teaching and education to life. I'm your host, Chris Carlton, and this podcast is being brought to you by the Faculty of Education at Queen's University.
Welcome to our podcast. In this episode, I am excited to be speaking with Kyle Raymond, who is a passionate educator currently pursuing a Master of Education here at Queen's. Our podcast conversation today revolves around the integration of video games in ELA classrooms. As I mentioned, Kyle is pursuing a Master of Education here at the Faculty and is working with Dr. Clare Ahn, who we spoke with on our podcast about critical digital literacy a few shows back. Kyle is working on his thesis titled, Flowering Narratives, the integration of video games in ELA classrooms to cultivate learning about environmentalism. He also holds a Bachelor of Education from Queens, and in addition to his academic pursuits, Kyle has been a music instructor teaching guitar and has served as a remote teacher and tutor for the past few years. Kyle, welcome to our podcast. Thank you for having me.
Kyle, I am excited about our conversation today. One, because I love video games and have used them in numerous ways throughout my teaching career. Video games are engaging full of light and sound and often widely accessible. And you today are going to introduce me to one that I have not had the opportunity to use yet, but have heard about and read about and now learning about through your thesis, and that's the video game Flower. But before we get to that, can you tell us a little bit about what you are researching? What is your thesis all about?
Kyle Raymond: Yeah, so my main concern with my research sort of revolves around a few points. The first being that youth are being exposed to video games in their free time a lot. They really like them. We see increase in popularity. And what I see in my own teaching experience is that some students are also disengaged with the types of texts that are being analyzed and read in ELA classrooms.
That's not to say that they're not great tax. It's just maybe it's not relating to too many of these students. So my goal with my research is to figure out with more ways that we can integrate this type of text video games that students engage with and bring that into the classroom. But I wanted to extend that a little bit further and focus more in on games that have a single player experience. And can further connect to topics of social justice, which are already common in ELA classrooms. So connecting video games for the classrooms, social justice to the classroom, and bridging these three things together.
Chris Carlton: And you've hit a chord with me as soon as you say environmentalism and social justice. That's what a lot of teachers are working towards and trying to give the students experience in that. So I'm familiar with Minecraft education and those type of virtual worlds. But you're talking about single player experiences. Can you just explain that phrase a little bit for us?
Kyle Raymond: Yeah, by single player experience, I mean stories that have a narrative. They're actually pretty linear. They have a start, they have an end. And once you finish the game, you complete it for the most part. And these types of games are still very popular among youth, along with multiplayer games and things like that. But what's really great about narrative games is that it's in some ways challenges the conception of video games within English classrooms and classrooms more broadly. So like you mentioned Minecraft, which is a fantastic game.
And it was something that I got to use in my education experience. But this is a lot of the times where teachers stop the integration of video games. They use Minecraft to teach a lot of STEM skills.
They use Minecraft to teach things related to art or geography, which are all fantastic. But there's limitations in what that can do in relation to the English classroom or social justice topics. So I suggest that these narrative games can do a better job at linking those two things.
Chris Carlton: And I love that you use the word narrative because the video game that you're going to talk about has a different type of narrative. And so that could lead us first into the second question is why should teachers consider using video games and in particular the video game flower, which is what you're talking about in the classroom?
Kyle Raymond: Yeah, I mean to talk to speak to the first point there that why teachers should be using these video games is that it touches upon so many different forms of literacy, some of which are outlined in the Ontario curriculum and in other curriculums. And like you can you can really do a lot with it because video games are in our have aspects of reading and writing. They have aspects of audio literacy of visual literacy of critical digital, all these forms of literacy that allows students to engage with it in a meaningful way.
Right. A lot of the times when we teach about digital or media literacy or critical literacy, it might not directly relate to student experience. So they might be asking themselves, well, why am I learning this?
Why am I doing this in this setting? And then to the second question of sort of narrative games and flower in particular is that as you mentioned, flowers quite interesting because there's no there's no dialogue in this game. So this game instead has players control the wind and at the start of each level, you're sort of just one petal in the wind and you're pushing that pedal around brushing past other flowers to add more pedals to this sort of ever growing.
I don't know group of little flower petals. And there's a start to the end of every level. And by the end of the level, you know, your single pedal is now hundreds, sometimes thousands of pedals. And this game in particular does a good job at having this sort of a subtle narrative. It's not, you know, for lack of a better term spoon fed to the game player.
Instead, they have to utilize these audio cues, these visual cues to understand the narrative a little bit more intently and to understand it to its fullest effect. And then one last point of flower that I have is that it connects really great with environmentalism. I don't want to spoil it for everyone out there, but it really does discuss aspects of human interaction with nature and what that looks like.
And what that may look like in the future, what it looks like in the past, what it looks like now. And I think in this type of game, it's very apparent that that's the connection. So I think it's a great game to use.
Chris Carlton: And it does it in a very subtle way. It's sort of that old phrase, learning in disguise, where you're going through this video and you're experiencing it. And I had a quote here from one of their reviews that says, the game's music, visuals and gameplay all drove the player into a compelling emotional experience. And as I was going through the video, it was very compelling and it was that sort of sense of peace or well-being as you follow this floating pedal through the different things.
And I will spoil it for some people. There is some very cool dramatic greening of the environment. And you start off in an apartment building with flowers and it looks like sort of the dark New York type of thing. And then go out into this wonderful wildness. And you don't necessarily play flower, but the more you interact with it and you become the wind and you become that sort of direction is where it's going. So I did find it, I found it very interesting. I think it's going to, like you said, when we talked about Minecraft education and more the STEM direction, this might appeal to people who more are the music and poetry and just that feeling, but it has an amazing, I can understand why you were attracted to it because I know your background in guitars and the instruments are pianos and strings and winds in the instruments. So, and I think it was designed by a music composer as well when it was originally done.
So which is pretty cool when you think that they started with the music and then introduced the actual video from there. So I found it very, very interesting and something that I would look to for an experience for my kids. That brings us to the question though, how do you logically have video games in the classroom? Teachers always wonder how do we bring that into the classroom?
Kyle Raymond: Yeah, this is a big question. I think this is the most pressing question because I'm sure there are a lot of educators out there who want to bring in video games into the classroom, but for various reasons they're unable to. One of those might just be how the classroom engages with that video game because what my research is focusing on is single player experiences. If an individual gamer is not experiencing that on an individual level, it might take something away. At the same time, it might add something to play video games in small groups. So either pairs or groups of four to five. And I've also seen teachers do things where they might play the game at the front of the class and project it on the board, something like that, and have students come up in pairs or something like that.
Or when they do like literacy circles where there's different stations that the students go to, that might be one of the stations that could be a way to integrate it. I've also seen, depending on the game, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, where people will watch YouTube walkthroughs of the game without any added dialogue on it. So you're just watching somebody else play the game, which has its own pros and cons of that as well. So those I think are the biggest elements of what does this look like in a class of 20, 25, 30 students? And I think the second one is cost because you need to have the machinery that can run these games.
You need to have enough machines that can run these games, the cost of the game itself, and all of these things to think about. And the wonderful thing, I feel like I'm trying to sell flour here, but that's not what I'm doing. The wonderful thing about flour is it's not as expensive as these other games. Like when you go to the store and you see these games that are like 80, 90, 100 dollars, it's nothing like that. This game came out a few years ago.
And there are just a lot of sort of in-v-type games that have this first-person narrative that are more cost-effective, but do more or less the same thing and may introduce your class to new video games or this new form of text that's different than sort of the main 10 games that a lot of people play.
Chris Carlton: I like that expression, new form of text. That's very cool. I hadn't thought about that, Kyle, in terms of almost like a read-aloud in terms of having it on the smart board, on the board behind me, and being able to interact with myself, but then actually have a reflection or question period or something like that. The stations to me would work quite well just having it at that station.
Now, they do have – and I'm not trying to sell it either, but they do have a Windows version, I think came out about four or five years ago, that I saw that didn't seem that expensive as well, so I'm not sure how we could incorporate that into it. So we figure out how to – we like it. We figure out how do we get it in to sort of let the kids do it. So now the question would be, how can we integrate it into our video into our classroom? How do we integrate that video into our classroom specifically in flowers? How could I use it?
Kyle Raymond: Yeah, that's a good question. So it's sort of the practical element of integrating a game like Flower. I mean, it sort of depends on the goal of the educator, what they're trying to get out of it. Are they trying to hone in on specific literacy skills? Are they trying to hone in on the environmentalism aspect, or is it just sort of a broad digital literacy aspect? I think that the easiest thing that comes to a lot of people's minds is sort of extending from the video game to in-classroom assessments in English class, you know, typical fashions of paragraph writing or essay writing, where they're analyzing this text and all the things that come with this text – the audio, the visual, the kinesthetic, the written components of Flower – and they bring that all together and they're making an argument with a thesis and they're looking for theme and literary devices and all of these things that we would normally do with anything else, with a poem, with a short story, a novel. Now I see film as being introduced a lot more into classrooms, and that's getting an extension of writing essays and paragraphs. So that could be one way to do it. What I see very popular online for teachers who have been integrating it is that they've been having sort of a reflection worksheet.
I don't like really calling it a worksheet, but sort of a handout that just has students think more critically about what they've just experienced. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? And I think this is where the opportunity comes in with environmentalism, because a lot of environmentalism for at least youth might be thinking and feeling at that point. Based on my teaching experience, youth might feel helpless, but to show them a piece of art or a piece of text that sort of is embracing the environment and asking questions of if this building wasn't here, what might the land look like.
It just provides a new perspective and a visual perspective that they wouldn't have received in other formats. It could also be just brought into sort of a broader classroom discussion. You can just talk about it as a whole, find out what students sort of took away from it, and drawing that connection between what they took away and sort of the curriculum goals or the educators' goals or whatever it might be.
Chris Carlton: I think that takeaway aspect, Kyle, is what I really like, is because everybody, I think, would take something a little bit different away from the experience of flower. Also, pushing their creativity and understanding. We're always asking our kids to be more creative, and when they're exposed to something like this, like the video flower, it forces them to think outside of the box, because there is no narrative in terms of voice narrative or text narrative. It's all the emotions that are in there. I think that's such a powerful thing. You talked about environmentalism, while we talk about environmental anxiety, this is sort of the pill to helping people feel calm about the positives about what we can do in the environment and how a single effort can make huge changes, which is that single pedal that flows through the six different levels of the game, which I think is really good. I'm looking forward to trying it, and thank you so much for introducing it in this way.
A tradition of our podcast, and you didn't know about this, so last little question, is one final question is the same as all of our guesses. In one sentence, what would be your advice for teachers to bring video games into the classroom, whether it be flower, whether it be something else? Some teachers are very nervous or sort of resistant to the idea of bringing in a video game, because it's the idea of always playing video games, so why would I bring it into my classroom now? What kind of advice could you give to some teachers that want to take a first step?
Kyle Raymond: I think taking that first step revolves around talking with your students, learning about video games and what video game means to them, how they enjoy it, and then learning more about it, whether that means as an educator you start playing these games that are free or maybe not so expensive, and just go through that process of integrating yourself into that gaming culture.
Chris Carlton: And the point you made about actually talking to your kids is so important. Imagine asking them for their opinion and how they could help direct their own education, which is what we hope to do all the time. Kyle, thank you so much for sharing your time and your research. We're looking forward to hearing more about your thesis as you complete it, and our listeners will definitely look forward to any further information or resources you can provide on our podcast website. So thank you again for your time. Thank you for having me. That does it for another episode of Popular Podagogy. Again, thank you to our amazing guest Kyle Raymond. Josh, as always, where can our listeners subscribe to make sure they don't miss any of our Popular Podagogy podcasts?
Josh Vine: Yeah, if you like what you hear, please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the CFRC website, the Faculty of Education website, and pretty much any place you hear your podcast.
Chris Carlton: Please don't forget to check out our Queen's Faculty of Education website and search for Popular Podagogy for additional resources and information on this important topic. Well, that's it from myself, Chris Carlton, and our incredibly talented and resourceful podcast team of Josh Vine, our sound engineer, and Erin York, our producer. Stay healthy, stay safe, and stay connected, and we will see you next time for another episode of Popular Podagogy.