How a popular entertainment genre on YouTube—Let's Play videos created by Minecraft players—offers opportunities for children to learn from their peers. Every day millions of children around the world watch video gameplay on YouTube in the form of a popular entertainment genre known as Let's Play videos. These videos, which present a player's gameplay and commentary, offer children opportunities for interaction and learning not available in traditional television viewing or solo video gameplay. In this book, Michael Dezuanni examines why Let's Play videos are so appealing to children, looking in particular at videos of Minecraft gameplay. He finds that a significant aspect of the popularity of these videos is the opportunity for knowledge and skill exchange. Focusing on Let's Play practices, the videos themselves, and fans' responses, Dezuanni argues that learning takes place through what he terms peer pedagogy—a type of nonhierarchical learning that is grounded in the personal relationships fans and players feel toward one another. Moreover, the Let's Play platform is part of a larger digital ecosystem that enables children to learn from one another in unique ways. Dezuanni explores how Let's Players enable learning opportunities, examining digital literacies, the Let's Play genre, and peer pedagogies. He then presents case studies of three successful family-friendly Let's Players of Minecraft: Stampylonghead, StacyPlays, and KarinaOMG, microcelebrities in a microindustry. Dezuanni analyzes the specific practices and characteristics of these players, paying particular attention to how they create opportunities for peer pedagogies to emerge.

How a popular entertainment genre on YouTube--Let's Play videos created by Minecraft players--offers opportunities for children to learn from their peers. Every day millions of children around the world watch video gameplay on YouTube in the form of a popular entertainment genre known as Let's Play videos. These videos, which present a player's gameplay and commentary, offer children opportunities for interaction and learning not available in traditional television viewing or solo video gameplay. In this book, Michael Dezuanni examines why Let's Play videos are so appealing to children, looking in particular at videos of Minecraft gameplay. He finds that a significant aspect of the popularity of these videos is the opportunity for knowledge and skill exchange.

Multiliteracies and Early Years Innovation: Perspectives from Finland and Beyond brings together internationally renowned scholars to investigate and reflect upon the significance of introducing multiliteracies in the education of children (0–8 years old) and the challenge of enhancing professional development opportunities of early years practitioners. The book brings together curriculum innovation and reform and the changing media ecology of young children's learning lives in a single volume. It provides insights into Finnish early years education in terms of policy, practice, and research with a specific focus on the enhancement of children’s multiliteracies. Case studies from around the world explore co-developing practices between researchers and teachers, the development of communities and the ways in which different classroom interventions draw on new kinds of teacher knowledge. This book will appeal to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students with an interest in early years education, literacy education, the sociology of digital culture, school reform, teacher education, and comparative education.

Pedagogical Opportunities of the Review Genre unleashes the pedagogical potential of the review genre, reframing the act of reviewing of cultural products as a communicative practice from a pedagogical perspective. Negotiating between traditions of journalism and media studies and pedagogy, the author presents a novel approach that will increase the readers’ understanding of an activity that is on the increase in an era where 'everyone can be a critic'. She identifies, describes, and develops genre-based pedagogies in formal, non-formal, and informal contexts of learning and teaching, in order to recontextualize the review as a form of learning and rethink of its potential as an inclusive, engaging, and a transformative critical cultural practice. This innovative and truly interdisciplinary study will interest students and researchers in the areas of media literacy, digital media, media and communication studies, cultural studies, sociology of arts, and pedagogical studies – in particular, cultural journalism and criticism, audience studies, cultural production, and cultural mediation, as well as critical media pedagogy and literacy studies.

The work of teachers is not just to teach. We are also responsible for the basic needs of students. Helping students eat and live, and also helping them find the tools they need to reflect on the present moment. This is exactly in keeping with Paulo Freire's insistence that critical pedagogy be focused on helping students read their world; but more and more, we must together reckon with that world. Teaching must be an act of imagination, hope, and possibility. Education must be a practice done with hearts as much as heads, with hands as much as books. Care has to be at the center of this work.For the past ten years, Hybrid Pedagogy has worked to help craft a theory of teaching and learning in and around digital spaces, not by imagining what that work might look like, but by doing, asking after, changing, and doing again. Since 2011, Hybrid Pedagogy has published over 400 articles from more than 200 authors focused in and around the emerging field of critical digital pedagogy. A selection of those articles are gathered here. This is the first peer-reviewed publication centered on the theory and practice of critical digital pedagogy. The collection represents a wide cross-section of both academic and non-academic culture and features articles by women, Black people, indigenous people, Chicanx and Latinx writers, disabled people, queer people, and other underrepresented populations. The goal is to provide evidence for the extraordinary work being done by teachers, librarians, instructional designers, graduate students, technologists, and more - work which advances the study and the praxis of critical digital pedagogy.

This book approaches English instruction through the lens of “fi gured worlds,” which recognizes and spotlights how students are actively engaged in constructing their own school, peer group, extracurricular, and community worlds. Teachers’ ability not only to engage with students’ experiences and interests in and outside of school but also to build connections between students’ worlds and their teaching is essential for promoting student agency, engagement, and meaningful learning. Beach and Caraballo provide an accessible framework for working with students to use critical discourse, narratives, media, genres, and more to support their identity development through addressing topics that are meaningful for them— their families, social issues, virtual worlds, and more. Through extensive activities and examples of students writing about their participation in these worlds, this text allows educators to recognize how students’ experiences in the classroom aff ect and shape their identities and to connect such an understanding to successful classroom practice. With chapters featuring eff ective instructional activities, this book is necessary reading for ELA methods courses and for all English teachers.

This book adds to the international research literature on contemporary Nordic childhoods in the context of fast-evolving technologies. It draws on the workshop program of the Nordic Research Network on Digital Childhoods funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS) during the years 2019–2021. Bringing together researchers from Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland, the book addresses pressing issues around children’s communication, learning and education in the digital age. The volume sheds light on cultural values, educational policies and conceptions of children and childhood, and child–media relationships inherent in Nordic societies. The book argues for the importance of understanding local cultures, values and communication practices that make up contemporary digital childhoods and extends current discourses on children’s screen time to bring in new insights about the nature of children’s digital engagement. This book will appeal to researchers, graduate students, educators and policy makers in the fields of childhood education, educational technology and communication. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a forceful reminder that education plays an important role in delivering not just academic learning, but also in supporting physical and emotional well-being. Balancing traditional “book learning” with broader social and personal development means new roles for schools and education more generally.