Trust, Pedagogy and Play

This paper reports selected findings from a set of classroom studies across several elementary school grades that involved a program of “just playing”, where videogame play was the focus of positive pedagogical attention. The focus here is on observations and analysis of gameplay in two middle school Canadian classrooms. The paper argues that, and illustrates how, playing video games engaged participating students, and their teachers, in overlooked, but educationally impactful, pedagogical practices—pecifically those engendering social relationships of mutual trust. Trust forms an overlooked bridge connecting play and pedagogy. Indispensable to both, trust is a central, indeed a necessary, condition of learning and play: you have to trust to play; you have to trust to learn. Building on observations and analyses of a 10-week videogame study with 2 middle school classes, this paper highlights the important role trust plays in learning generally, and in learning from video games in particular.