Bridging the Gap

A bridge in Second Life. Image courtesy of Wildstar Beaumont on Flickr.

Why build bridges between Second Life and secondary education? Second Life—indeed, computer and video games more generally—has a great deal to offer rhetoric and composition instructors. In the wake of tectonic shifts (Yancey, 2004) that have moved us far beyond mere alphabetic literacy, many instructors are searching for ways to engage students in the teaching of writing and encourage them to both critique and produce multimodal texts. By their very nature, games move participants beyond passive learning into active, participatory learning situations. Games, therefore, are excellent educational tools because of their ability to exercise not only the player’s intellect but also the body: “What makes the game experience unique from other mediated experiences—and thus a powerful heuristic—is its kinesthesis. Gaming requires players to use their bodies as well as their minds to help create and advance narratives by performing specific yet changeable actions” (Ruggill, Moeller, Pearce, and McAllister, 2005, p. 53). Teaching in Second Life requires students to actively participate and take accountability for their education (Cheal, 2007, p. 207), all the while as they are confronted with a landscape that is not only entirely user-generated, but also embodies many of the most difficult issues facing society today: racism, sexism, classism; issues of intellectual property and materiality; the limits of the law in online spaces.

Second Life is a virtual community that allows for the creation of new online relationships, the reinforcement of established offline associations, and the formation of both strong and weak ties overall, all within the guise of a constantly available game-like setting only bounded by the limitations of the hardware and collective imagination of its residents. While it mirrors our world in many ways, it also provides us with a nearly limitless educational playground in which we can play. In order to attain more sophisticated levels of critical media literacy, students should be asked to engage in virtual worlds and participate in the creation of their own identities and even, if possible, in the creation of the online world itself. Here is where Second Life is an ideal educational space. Students' immersion into this kind of multimodal space will assist them in generalizing their experiences by transferring their understandings of virtuality and subjectivity into their offline lives. As a result, students can become more aware, more critical even, of rhetoric in their everyday lives. By simultaneously "writing" their bodies through the creation of their avatars in online worlds and writing about their rhetorical choices in the composition classroom, students' understandings of rhetorical effectiveness, the interplay of audience and author, etc., are all enhanced.

This is why it is so important to bridge the gaps between Second Life and secondary education. Too often when we seek to engage students in their educational goals while also providing substantive arenas for the development of critical literacies, we may overlook popular media, seeing them as threats to formalized education. Admittedly, the incorporation of popular media in the writing classroom requires careful pedagogical forethought and, particularly in the case of video games, often considerable technical knowledge as well. And, as this webtext has highlighted, there are certainly areas where instructors should proceed with caution rather than leaping in. But overall, Second Life offers many intriguing pedagogical benefits for composition classrooms that can enhance traditional means of teaching students to compose in ways meaningful to them.