ARTICLES
Game-informed meaning making in math class: Cooperative competition and
students’ literacies/numeracies
This article features data from a larger, ongoing eight-year study involving game-informed learning in public high school math classes in the northeastern United States. More specifically, the focus on cooperative competition and assessment reveals how specific principles of gaming, namely discovery, reflexivity, contextual understanding, and sharing, can support the development of students’ literacies and numeracies. Furthermore, this article addresses how game-informed teaching and learning can be applied to L1 classroom.
Artifacts with feelings/feeling artifacts: Towards a notion of tacit modalities to support and propel anthropological research
In this article, we consider the notion of tacit modalities as a theory and method for researchers. Based on research studies with individuals across ages and stages of life, we interviewed people about objects that they value, and what pervades all of the stories are tacit, lived properties that objects possess. The research ostensibly sought to extend work on the notion of artifactual literacies and tacit modalities, and, in the end, what stretched the research were sensory, embodied, and non-representational experiences expressed by collaborators in the research. This article focuses on three people’s stories about their felt experiences and sensory-led (and laden) stories associated with objects. To analyze interview data, we apply transdisciplinary theories that offer the reader a syncretic conceptual experience of tacit modalities as a method within ethnographic work to locate sensorial, affective dimensions of objects.
IMAGINE research of transformational
assessment (in press)
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In the context of studying human beings, at the macro level, assessment is the process of documenting, analyzing, and interpreting empirical data to provide evidence regarding an observable entity concerning humans that emerges cognitively, affectively, physically, metaphysically, and/or spiritually, and which is internal or external to the person or group being observed. In this article, we argue that assessment does not belong exclusively to either the qualitative or quantitative research tradition; rather, it is central to both traditions, as well as to mixed methods research. Moreover, in every research study—whether representing the qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods research tradition—some form of assessment is used. Further, assessment not only represents a social constructionist and/or a social constructivist act, but also, and even more importantly, it represents a political act. This article features a discussion about the systemic, historically disempowering nature of assessment that privileges an artificial and racist norm, as well as silences and punishes participants who become othered by traditional research and assessment paradigms. Thus, we invite researchers—regardless of their methodological experiences and orientations—to embrace an integrative mixed methods antiracist groundwork for investigating and nurturing equity (IMAGINE; S. S. Abrams et al., 2021, 2022; Onwuegbuzie et al., in press-b), a research and evaluation meta-framework that we use here to transform assessment to support more equitable and empowering research. Utilizing critical dialectical pluralism (Onwuegbuzie et al., in press-a; Onwuegbuzie & Frels, 2013), which underscores the inclusion of participants and their voices at every stage of the research process—from conceptualization to dissemination to utilization—we focus on research that honors participants as co-researchers, co-ideators, and co-decision makers, who, through their involvement in the research, become activists striving to identify problems and to effect change that they envision in local and/or global contexts.