How Gamers Learn

Game-Design Pedagogy and Its Implications for Contemporary Music Education

Project Overview

Over the past decade, video games and classroom pedagogy has gained traction as a topic in music education discourse. Some scholars explore integrating digital music games in the music classroom to engage students and aid in skills acquisition (Keeler, 2020; Espinosa, 2020). Others explore including video game music in the school repertoire as a reflection of student preferences (Haynes, 2024). Still others look at the “gamification” of the music classroom - turning learning activities into games (Candel & Colmenero, 2022; Richards, 2023). Less understood is how video games have changed the way that young people learn (Tobias & O’Leary, 2017; Gee, 2003, 2008) and how students are developing, through video games, unique ‘habits of mind’ – dispositions for learning that they then bring to the music classroom. The purpose of this Kilmer study is to explore how young gamers (college-age students) are developing dispositions for learning (habits of mind) through video game play and are then transferring those dispositions to the classroom. The study will be conducted by preservice music education students who self-identify as gamers. The research is rooted in the following research questions: How do preservice music education students, who self-identify as gamers, experience the pedagogy of video game play; how do they identify the learning dispositions developed through game play? How, if at all, do they conceptualize the experience and those disposition in relation to designing classroom pedagogy for their own students?

Faculty Bio

Judy Lewis is assistant professor of music education at Crane School of Music. Over the past decade, Dr. Lewis has researched and published on the ways in which young learners are developing new literacies through engagements with technology and how teachers might build on those literacies to enhance and revitalize classroom pedagogy.