Meeting with Dalia about Minecraft Utopia

2021-04-15

Dalia:

  • Curating the world that students start in

    • Planting things in the world that students discover
    • What is the role of history in this world?
      • Maybe there are artifacts / rememberances of this world?
      • Which students need to consider as they build.

  • A dreamlife landscape. Maybe we can flex into using aftofuturism as a way of seeing, thinking, doing pedagogy. Palimsestic time.

  • Memorialization.

  • Wake

  • Want to be able to read what the students do.

The questing element could be this.

Transliteracy questions.

  • talk with parents ahead of time.

  • Dalia thought of, when the world is being created, is through traditions.

  • The reason why. If the world is nil and we’re building it anew.

  • What if we are drawing on our family histories to build what we are doing here.

  • What would it mean to think about how we could adopt or connect traditions.

  • Creatively introduce students to a learning context that is student-driven.

  • Tools, task structures, participant structures, discursive practices.

  • tools, rituals, identities, ways of talking.

  • TOOLS

  • RITUALS

  • IDENTITIES

  • WAYS OF TALKING

  • True collaboration

  • Critical imagination

  • Resilience

  • Maybe we can learn pedagogically from literature

  • Unearth in some way how they now think about past, present, and future. Think, as educators, how they are already being disciplined/educated into thinking about past, present, and future.

Cultural historical activity theory.

Transliteracy CHAT is useful?

Chris will theorize the CHAT + learning goals…. Dalia will ground the IP goals in broader afrofuturist theory. Chris will poke IRB.

Later conversation

(Not sure about the date)

Dalia conversation

  • Glissant’s right to opacity.

    • Zuboff The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

    • Joan Linder interview.

I want to create contexts where we can develop strategies for critical resistance. I don’t think surveillance here will reduce students'

Students come into Minecraft fully-literate on the hidden curriculum. What are the practices and narratives that they already bring in with them? Every one of them is going to bring all of their brain to this world, which is familiar because it’s Minecraft but unfamiliar because it’s this workshop.

Think about the intersection of all of what they bring (the hybrid landscape) (syncretism). The students bring an obedience to the script but also a youthful disruptiveness. Do they experience a conflict between the scripts they bring in and what we ask of them?

–> As TAs share the game, what happens? –> tensio

NOTES: – What can we glean about what they already bring?

– An important intervention.

“Sailing on the sea.” How can we live in digital worlds The only way to stay sane is to not think about it.

What do I think? Whether to introduce this kind of conversation? Would it be beneficial to come from the TAs?

Rhizomatic structures. My identity is in relation. Who are you here?

The students might get drawn to the mainland for conquest reasons. – discovery as conquest. – does their questing change?

Before next week, build something new as part of the world.

How do we build group or class identity?

– Name your place.

ICE BREAKER

– bring their own knowledge – something you really care about. It could be in Minecraft, like “I’m really into farming chickens,” or it could be

It could be something light-hearted or something really serious.

– digital space.

a sort of zone of proximal develope