National Academy of Education / Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to Arturo Cortez

Dr. Arturo Cortez has been awarded a Research Development Award to further develop his proposal for a National Academy of Education / Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship that is titled, “Modding New Social Futures in Virtual and Everyday Worlds: Co-designing Speculative Pedagogies in Videogame Play.” A brief description of his work is below:

A teacher learning framework that strategically engages with the sociopolitical dimensions of learning and the design towards new social futures—specifically with the use of everyday technologies—is more relevant and necessary than ever. Speculative approaches to education provide a robust framework to understand and design justice and future-oriented pedagogies for civic teaching and learning. This project draws on speculative approaches to inquiry to examine the affordances of gaming, an everyday digital technology, as a site for consequential and future-oriented teacher learning where educators, alongside youth, creatively prototype agentic identities, equitable forms of participation, and new spatial architectures towards a just world. Specifically, the study explores how young people and educators learn to decode and recode videogames and develop new storylines that center justice and liberation. Toward this end, this design-based research project engages: 1) the design of intergenerational learning ecologies that explicitly center play as a leading activity for learning ; 2) centering the everyday digital cultural practices of youth as springboards for learning design for teachers; and 3) expanding understandings of where and how consequential learning occurs for teachers, underscoring transformational practices that emerges in co-learning with youth in informal learning environments. A central conjecture of this study is that play-rich spaces can foster speculative pedagogies, which cultivate imaginings of new social futures that are equitable and can inform the development of justice-centered pedagogies for educators.

Dr. Cortez is an Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences and Human Development at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he is also a fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science. He is a former teacher, longtime participant in the University-Community Links (UC Links) community, and a valued member of the Mind, Culture, and Activity and Cultural Praxis Editorial Collective. His most recent publication, Interrogating the notion of giving voice: designing for polyphony in game-based learning ecologies, is available online at MCA and will soon be published in an MCA special issue.