“Thank you for the Excitement”: Pre-service Teachers’ Engagement in and Outcomes from Culture and Language Escape Room Experiences

This article reports a case study of eight undergraduate pre-service English-language-learner (ELL) teachers who participated in four educational escape room (EER) experiences to learn about their future students’ languages and cultures. Using task engagement facilitators as a theoretical framework, the researchers designed the experiences and explored the pre-service teachers’ perceptions and knowledge gains. Following a design-based research methodology, the study describes the escape rooms, presents both numeric and descriptive data from observations, surveys, and interviews, and provides EER design principles arising from the results. The study found that all the pre-service ELL teacher participants were engaged in the experiences, and they noted that the use of escapes is a compelling way to study their future students’ backgrounds during their teacher education program. Participants had different outcomes, but they all described the experiences as raising their awareness of culture. Implications include that task engagement facilitators can be integrated usefully into ELL teacher education experiences, and that following specific EER design principles, including task engagement facilitators, can make the experience effective and engaging. This paper contributes to the literature by employing frameworks and methods not yet common in the language teacher education literature and by providing explicit guidelines for EER use for language teacher education programs.