Building new social futures in video game play: Co-designing pedagogical prototypes for imagining beyond inequity

Arturo Cortez

Historically marginalized communities frequently use everyday technologies to design new social futures, imagining beyond society’s most pressing inequities. Thus, it is necessary for educators to be prepared to design and leverage future-oriented—speculative—pedagogies with young people’s everyday use of digital technologies. In addition, given that learning is profoundly relational, the importance of designing for equitable relationships between educators and learners should become central in how educators are prepared across formal and informal learning environments. As such, this design-based research project explores how after-school educators learn to develop and iterate upon pedagogical prototypes as they implement robust relational practices necessary for future-oriented work with youth. Within this orientation, this study examines how designed gaming environments, organized around socio-cultural notions of learning, have particular affordances for teacher learning where educators, alongside youth, creatively prototype agentic identities, equitable forms of participation, and embed new values and social relations into just virtual worlds, within the context of video game play. In leveraging a social design-based research methodology, this study draws on critical approaches to the learning sciences and speculative frameworks as they orient us to a social analysis of extant and everyday practices, to reimagine possibilities for the preparation of educators, while they also encourage practitioners and researchers to design for more expansive, just, and creative learning ecologies. The central conjecture of this study is that the tools and participation frameworks of designed gaming environments will support educators in developing robust frameworks for equitable relationship-building as part of their larger conceptualizations of speculative pedagogies.

About Arturo Cortez

Arturo Cortez is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis. As a learning scientist, Cortez explores how justice- and future-oriented contexts of teaching and learning can support educators and young people to imagine beyond today’s injustices. In particular, he is interested in how intergenerational and transdisciplinary collaboratives speculate new possible futures, mediated by their participation with everyday technologies in gaming contexts, for example. As such, Cortez designed The Learning To Transform (LiTT) Video Gaming Lab to study how play-based learning environments encourage educators to engage in more symmetrical relationships with young people, while also developing expansive pedagogical models that center equitable relationship-building and robust collaboration. His work has been published in Reading Research Quarterly (2024), Mind, Culture, and Activity (2019, 2023), Cognition and Instruction (2022), the Journal of Futures Studies (2022), the Association of Mexican American Educators Journal (2020), and the Review of Research in Education (2017). Furthermore, his research has been supported by the George Lucas Educational Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. Cortez currently serves as Associate Editor of Mind, Culture, and Activity, the premier journal in sociocultural and cultural historical approaches to education and learning. He is also the Program Co-Chair for the 2025 International Conference of the Learning Sciences. Recently, Cortez was recognized as an honorable mention for the 2024 Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies (AERA Division C). Cortez, a former public school educator, holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.