Tracing agentic shifts in PST conceptions of teaching through participation in roleplaying games alongside youth

Purpose The field of English education is in need of teacher education contexts that bridge the theory-practice divide of using games to meet literacy instructional goals. The purpose of this paper is to see what pre-service teachers learn from playing games alongside youth. Design/methodology/approach Drawing from theorizations of multiliteracies pedagogies and teacher agency, this social design experiment examines what three pre-service teachers (PSTs) learned from engaging in a weekly in-person program that brought together youth and teachers to participate in table-top roleplaying games (TTRPGs). PSTs participated in roleplaying games, collected and analyzed feedback from youth participants and designed and implemented TTRPGs for the youth. Coding pre- and post-interviews and triangulating with teaching artifacts, post-session reflections and field notes of the sessions, the authors traced agentic shifts in PSTs’ understanding of games for learning, conceptions of curriculum and instruction and classroom structures for conflict resolution. Findings The authors found that PSTs helped youth navigate across personal and literacy learning goals, learning to provide customized differentiation for youth and to support productive conflicts instead of conflict avoidance. PSTs also noticed benefits of disrupting normative social structures through gameplay. Originality/value Answering questions in the field around how teachers can effectively learn to use games in agentic and equitable ways, the authors suggest that playing games alongside youth and focusing on youth’s goals for learning helped PSTs to notice and support more disruptive uses of play and engage more expansive and social justice-aligned conceptions of game-based learning.