Afterword

I need to start with a confession of sorts; I am a relative late-bloomer when it comes to my gaming practices. Where I had early elementary school experiences forging rivers on the Oregon Trail and trying to write LOGO code which would help my on-screen turtle move in a specific pattern, I found community in and was drawn to other spaces and media. We have to fast forward a little over thirty years later to see my gamer-self emerge and that all happened because of a middle schooler named Cole.

I’d been co-teaching and researching in Cole’s below-level eighth-grade English classroom for the academic year, helping his teachers to revise a literacy curriculum that focused on students’ performance within a mandated online reading remediation program. The work was limiting as the district remained focused on data and test scores rather than our ideas around supporting voluminous, independent, and choice-rich reading or on using the technology supplied through a 1:1 program for digital reading and writing. On a day when I felt particularly spent, I found myself in our community library – one of my places of solace and community. I was creating lists of high-interest YA titles that I’d hoped to share with students through classroom book talks and book passes. As engaged as I was in that work, I looked up when I heard the familiar voices of Cole and some of his peers from our fourth period, eighth-grade class. They blew right by the shelves of the YA section (where I was quite literally covered in books) and headed through a doorway into a room labeled “For Teens.”