Essay On The Role Of Video Games In Education

Challenging literary canon, even in small ways, can be a daunting task for teachers of literature. Literary canon in the western world grew out university reading lists and the work of anthologists who compiled collections of “Great” texts that each anthologist considered the cornerstone of proper education, such as the Harvard Classics, containing fifty-one volumes ranging from folklore and fables to poetry, prose, and drama and spanning many centuries of literature in the English language. Many people today, students and teachers included, consider these works of canon to be the ultimate selection of works to read if a person wants to be well-read or well-educated in the English discipline. Yet, students, teachers, and scholars of pedagogy alike have started speaking up more and more in recent years to bring light to the exclusionary nature of these collections and canons, as well as to find ways to broaden the scope of what we read in the classroom. Now, classrooms around the world are engaging students with traditional canonical texts as well as more recently-accepted texts including the mediums of film, television, and graphic novels, the genres of science fiction, fantasy, legend, and

Video games are the subject of controversy both in and out of academia, with many parents, scholars, and authority figures dismissing the potential values of video games entirely because of the violence or other adult content that some video games contain. For example, professor Melina Uncapher of UCSF wrote an article titled “Action Video Gameplay: Benefits and Dangers” in which she explained the education benefits of action games, including the development of skills like multitasking and decision-making. However, she went on to assert that no researchers would specify any particular game titles or most-beneficial game play timeframes for action games. She