Digital Games and Media Education in the Classroom: Exploring Concepts, Practices, and Constraints

Abstract

The starting point of this chapter is the fact that the new digital media are increasingly penetrating all areas of our daily and professional life, but so far, less importance has been placed on the use of these media in schools and teaching. This applies to both the field of media didactics, meaning the use of digital media to support teaching and learning processes, as well as to the field of media pedagogy, where the media become a central subject of teaching and learning processes. This paper focuses mainly on the second field, although it is difficult to always draw an exact line between the two fields. On behalf of the Landesanstalt fur Medien Nordrhein-Westfalen (Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia), we conducted a study at the University of Magdeburg aimed at demonstrating the possibility of turning computer games, as a popular form of digital media, into a subject for reflective analysis in the classroom. This chapter explains the general framework of the study, the methodological approach, and selected results. Our research uncovered not only exemplary approaches, practices, and procedures (best-practice) but also some structural problems and constraining factors, so that the overall result is ambivalent.