T6 Flashback -7 Video Games Are Good For You

After the FuturePlay 2005 Conference in Lansing Michigan I was fortunate enough to interview Dr. Jim Gee, who presented at FP 05.

Dr. Gee received his Ph.D in linguistics from Stanford University in 1975. He started his career in theoretical linguistics, working in syntactic and semantic theory, and taught initially in the School of Language and Communication at Hampshire College in Amherst Massachusetts. He went on to do research in psycholinguistics at Northeastern University in Boston and at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Holland.

As his research focus began to switch to studies on discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and applications of linguistics to literacy and education, he took a position in the School of Education at Boston University, where he was the chair of the Department of Developmental Studies and Counseling. From Boston University, he went on to serve as a professor of linguistics in the Linguistics Department at the University of Southern California and, later, served as the first Jacob Hiatt Professor of Education in the Hiatt Center for Urban Education at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

In 1998, he became the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. From 1989-1992, Prof. Gee was a co-director of the Mellon Foundation funded Literacies Institute in Newton, Massachusetts, an organization that sponsored joint teacher and researcher research on language and literacy. From 1995-1998, he was co-director of a Spencer Foundation funded research project at Clark University that ran a community-based after-school science project for culturally diverse urban middle-school children.

Prof. Gee’s work over the last decade has centered on the development of an integrated theory of language, literacy, and schooling, a theory that draws on work in socially situated cognition, sociocultural approaches to language and literacy, language development, discourse studies, critical theory, and applied linguistics. Prof. Gee’s recent work has extended his ideas on language, literacy, and society to deal with the so-called "new capitalism" and its cognitive, social, and political implications for literacy and schooling.

More recently, he has engaged in research on learning and literacy in video and computer games. He has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education and is a member of the editorial board of twelve journals. In 1989, the Journal of Education, one of the longest running journals in education in the United States, published a special issue devoted to reprinting his early essays on literacy.

His books include Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Second Edition 1996); The Social Mind (1992); Introduction to Human Language (1993); The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism (1996, with Glynda Hull and Colin Lankshear); and An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (1999); and Power Up: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (to appear in 2003).

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