This paper presents a case study drawn from design-based research (DBR) on a mobile, place-based augmented reality history game. Using DBR methods, the game was developed by the author as a history learning intervention for fifth to seventh graders. The game is built upon historical narratives of disenfranchised populations that are seldom taught, those typically relegated to the 'null curriculum'. These narratives include the stories of women immigrant labour leaders in the early twentieth century, more than a decade before suffrage. The project understands the purpose of history education as the preparation of informed citizens. In paying particular attention to historical themes that endure overtime, the game aims to draw connections between historical and contemporary narratives of diverse and disenfranchised populations. The study discusses new design knowledge for addressing such narratives. Self-reflexivity, the technique of revealing the means of production of the game technology itself can be used to spotlight contemporary issues of disenfranchisement. Supra-reveals, historical thematic foreshadowing, can help establish key links between themes of disenfranchisement of diverse groups in the past and those in the present. These techniques used together, and the subsequent curriculum, brought focus to teaching issues of diversity and disenfranchisement typically written out of curriculum. Part I: theoretical background and rationale for narratives
This article provides an analysis of Occupy Judaism, an explicitly religious expression of Jewish protest, which occurred simultaneously with Occupy Wall Street, the direct-democracy movement of 2011. Occupy Judaism, like Occupy Wall Street, took place both in physical spaces of protest in New York City and digitally, through mobilizing and circulating debate. The article focuses on the words and actions of Daniel Sieradski, the public face and one of the key founders of Occupy Judaism, supplemented by the experiences of others in Occupy Judaism, Occupy Wall Street, and Occupy Faith (a Protestant clergy-led initiative). We investigate what qualified as religion in the public sphere of Occupy Wall Street, the implications of activities that blurred the lines between religious and secular in the context of public protest, and the relationship of these place-based activities to digital practice. The article emphasizes the importance of ethnographically investigating both physical protest and digital debate, which in this case created the potential for Jewish leftist religion to occupy a new space in the public sphere for a short time in 2011. Attention to the mediation of religion in the public sphere has implications for rethinking what constitutes the political, the religious, and the secular, as well as how digital practices may be implicated in debates over these terms.
Lost & Found is a game series, created at the Initiative for Religion, Culture, and Policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology MAGIC Center. 1 The series teaches medieval religious legal systems. This article uses the first two games of the series as a case study to explore a particular set of processes to conceive, design, and develop games for learning. It includes the background leading to the author's work in games and teaching religion, and the specific context for the Lost & Found series. It discusses the rationale behind working to teach religious legal systems more broadly, then discuss the hermeneutics influencing the approach to understanding the legal systems being modeled, and closes with a discussion of the kind of teaching and learning involved in the design of the games and early stage data on the public play of the games.
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