Game-Based Learning and the Challenges of School Reform

Abstract

The previous three chapters—Chaps. 4, 5, and 6—illustrated how authentic game- based learning can be enacted in the classroom, to good effect, in humanities as well as the sciences. In this chapter, I take up the challenges entailed in making such learning normative and customary in formal education: to make the poten- tial actual. To achieve actuality, it will be necessary to understand why the prac- tice of schooling resists change and how economic, social, and political forces and discourses that envelop schooling construct a nexus of interwoven customs and expectations that have the tendency to maintain the status quo.