Webinar Series
Designing for Robust STEAM Learning: Everyday Worldmaking in Gaming Ecologies
MƒA teachers can register for this event on the Small-World Network.
Date+Time
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The MƒA Equity Webinars Series invites nationally recognized educators to share ideas that support equity within STEM. Following an interactive presentation by the speaker, Master Teachers have the opportunity to discuss how these ideas might be applied in their own school environments in small groups. Teachers from MƒA, other Master Teacher programs, and people interested in learning more about MƒA are invited to attend.
How might video games be used to support the development of our socio-political imagination? As schools begin to implement new and innovative technologies, it will be imperative they also recognize and include tools widely used by young people. In particular, the pandemic marshaled in a new era of video game play. Online multiplayer games have created space for new collaborations across national, geographic, and generational boundaries. Here, young people are leveraging creative computational literacies to build new and more equitable worlds, engaging their socio-political imaginations.
In this talk, Dr. Cortez discusses the possibilities everyday video gaming can provide for designing robust STEAM learning. Specifically, he shares insights and vignettes from The Learning To Transform (LiTT) Video Gaming Lab, a space he founded that supports undergraduates, community members, and Black, Latinx, and LGBTQIA+ high school students in jointly re-imagining the role of everyday gaming as a robust site for learning. There are no prerequisites for attending this webinar. Non-gamers are especially welcome.
Dr. Arturo Cortez is an Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences and Human Development and a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Drawing on critical approaches to the learning sciences, Cortez explores the possibilities of co-designing for consequential learning in intergenerational and transdisciplinary learning environments that include young people, educators, researchers, and community members such as game designers, social media influencers, and content creators. More recently, Cortez founded The Learning To Transform (LiTT) Video Gaming Lab to help build models for equity and student learning by designing deeper relationships across the various learning ecologies people traverse in their daily lives. Cortez’s early commitments to amplifying the everyday practices of youth were jointly honed and developed while he was a middle school teacher in East Palo Alto and a high school teacher in San Francisco. Cortez holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, an Ed.M. from Harvard University, an M.A.T. from the University of San Francisco, and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.