LRC Invited Speaker: Dr. Sébastien Dubreil, Carnegie Mellon University

Using games to build a learning community in the L2 classroom
with Dr. Sébastien Dubreil
Carnegie Mellon Unviversity

Since the COVID‐19 pandemic has led to a radical transformation of the educational landscape, educators have had to manage the transition to a wide variety of models, including just about every variation between all online teaching and all face-to face classrooms, and every combination in-between, sometimes having to compose with both residential and remote learners. This situation has caused profound disruption to classroom instruction. In this presentation, I will try to envision how games, and game design can serve as avenues not only to structure the language classroom, but also to help in creating a community of learners and create and tighten the social bond between learners. Drawing from a course that was disrupted by the transition, we will examine how, by meshing a pedagogy of active learning with a pedagogy of care, we can meet the pedagogical challenge posed by current circumstances, retain the integrity of the course, and advance the teaching and learning enterprise. In particular, we will examine how the current situation is an opportunity to combine language and culture pedagogy with game design to enable students to think critically about the course content and contribute meaningful solutions to learning languages in the age of social distancing.

In preparation for the event we recommend reading the following:

• Dubreil, Sébastien. “Using games for language learning in the age of social distancing.” Foreign Language Annals 53.2 (2020): 250-259.
• Reinhardt, Jonathon, Kirby, Samantha. “8 things to know about teaching languages with videogames.” CALICO Infobytes. August (2020).