Social Innovation > Act

This mission was a fairly simple one to accomplish for myself, as I have been "shadowing" my 'social innovator hero', Dr. James P. Gee, the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies in the University of Arizona (formerly the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading in the University of Wisconsin) for a few years now. I have always believed and known that videogames are not only excellent tools for teaching and learning, but also have integrated great educational models. Granted, before I began my studies in education I worded these ideas with the limited linguistic faculty I posessed as "man teachers should use Final Fantasy to teach us these story analysis stuff" and "man if math and science had tutorials they would rule", but the core idea was the same then as it is now. I discovered Gee on 2005 when I began my graduate studies in Education. I knew from before I was accepted in the university that my thesis would be something along the lines of "videogames and attitudes towards education", and my research kept leading me towards Gee's books.

I have since reviewed all of Gee's texts on videogames and education and I love how he is trying to innovate in education - a field that needs to evolve desperately. I have published various articles following Gee's charge on videogames and education / literacy, and even managed to convince Dr. Nick Faraclas, one of the world's top linguistics scholars and a researcher who worked with Gee on research regarding cognition, to be on my thesis committee.

When Gee was still in Wisconsin I had plans of doing Ph.D. studies in said university. I was looking forward to changing the educational landscape by working with the foremost world authority in the field. But then, in one of his later texts he said something along the lines of "I'm not talking about using videogames in the classroom as ESL resources or anything like that", which was, incidentally, my focus. He then moved to Arizona to teach. Now I try to keep up-to date with Gee's stuff through Game Culture and Education, the journal in which he is an editor, and by subscriptions to several Gee sites.