Cross-Saving in the Classroom: The Intersections of Transfer and Game-Based Learning

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to discover and examine the intersections between writing knowledge transfer and game-based learning. Writing knowledge transfer represents one of the ultimate goals of composition pedagogy: the recontextualization of writing skills into different contexts. Game-based learning is a set of practices that utilizes gameplay in the classroom to lead to student learning. Taken together, game-based learning can inform our methods of facilitating transfer in the writing classroom. This dissertation encourages composition studies to further consider how game-based learning can be utilized to foster the recontextualization of knowledge. By explicitly bringing these two bodies of scholarship together, this dissertation creates new opportunities for both research and teaching. In order to best understand the intersections between transfer and games, this dissertation examines how current practices that have been identified as fostering transfer are present in game-based learning, and how games in the classroom can be leveraged to facilitate the recontextualization of knowledge into contexts both inside of and beyond the writing classroom.