Constance Steinkuehler

Constance Steinkuehler - Featured Speaker @ KOTESOL 2022

Featured Session

Language and Literacy in Online Games and Esports

Video games have emerged as the leading entertainment media among youth, garnering more daily attention and time on task from middle schoolers and teens than homework. Due to their time demands, games are often positioned in competition with literacy and learning rather than part of it, but what if games were instead a hook to get kids reading in situated, interest-driven ways? In this presentation, I review more than a decade of empirical work on the relationship between video games play and literacy. From fan fiction writing to reading textbooks as a way to “cheat” the system, games recruit print text in multiple ways as a natural everyday part of digital play. Here, I review the quantity and quality of reading in relation to games, how writing is positioned online as another form of gameplay, and the role that interpersonal communication plays in successful esports competitions. 

Time: Saturday (April 30) 12:00 noon KST (50 min., Synchronous)

 Biosketch

Constance Steinkuehler is a professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine where she researches culture, cognition, and learning in the context of multiplayer online videogames. She is an ADL Belfer Fellow, the chair of UCI’s Game Design and Interactive Media Program, co-director of the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Center, and chair of the Annual GLS Conference. She teaches courses on games and society, visual design, and research methods. Her current projects include investigations of toxicity and extremism in online games, evaluation of an enriched esports for high school students, and reasoning with misinformation. 

Dr. Steinkuehler formerly served as Senior Policy Analyst under the Obama administration in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, advising on videogames and digital media. She is the founder of the Federal Games Guild, a working group across federal agencies using games and simulations as tools for thought, and the Higher Education Video Games Alliance, an academic non-for-profit organization of game-related programs in higher education. Her research has been funded by the Anti-Defamation League, the Samueli Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Universities of Cambridge, Wisconsin-Madison, and California-Irvine. She has published over 100 articles and book chapters, including six conference proceedings, four special journal issues, and two books. She has worked closely with the National Research Council and National Academy of Education on special reports related to videogames, and her work has been featured in Science, Wired, USA Today, New York Times, LA Times, ABC, CBS, CNN, NPR, BBC, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Dr. Steinkuehler has a PhD in literacy studies, an MS in educational psychology, and three bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, English, and religious studies. Her dissertation was a cognitive ethnography of the MMOs Lineage I and II, where she ran a large siege guild. Her husband, Dr. Kurt Squire, is co-director of the GLS Center at UCI. They live with their two adolescent gamers in Southern California where they enjoy surfing, trail running, camping, and all manner of headset-wearing, DPS-flinging, computer-screened mayhem.

Select Sites
UCI, Department of Informatics: Constance Steinkuehler
LinkedIn: Constance Steinkuehler
Academia.edu: Constance Steinkuehler
C. Steinkuehler contribution to The English Connection (Spring, 2022) 

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