Abstract
Contemporary society has demanded innovative solutions for the uncertainties that the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed in our educational system. Gamification has long demonstrated that students' active engagement provides positive results if taken into account in the design of the educational strategies. One of the innovative solutions that this chapter proposes through the use of gamification is the tool of educational escape rooms. In order to do this, it provides three study cases implemented in the ESL classroom and the classroom of “Introduction to Literary Techniques” at the University of Granada. Doing so, it provides solutions and recommendations for the identified challenges to use these tools in the classrooms by introducing escape rooms within different educational scenarios as well as proposing affective pedagogies as a robust theoretical and methodological framework.
TopIntroduction
Contemporary society has taught us the need to move beyond established boundaries in many different spheres of life. Recent phenomena, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have altered our daily behavior and for most of us, the way we develop our professional career. As professors, we have been forced to move to an online context that has destabilized and destabilizes the university as we know; Professors and students need to adapt to new digital realities that are substituting (at least momentarily) the physical classrooms that we had. Nevertheless, the need to change the learning process is not something new (Castells, 1994); nor is it how the relationship between technology and education also changes the way we perceive that learning process (Sancho, 2019; Miño et al, 2019). Technologies are changing our teaching and learning habits and developing into a myriad of methodologies that pursue a more horizontal approach between students and teachers, trying to pursue a point of departure that situates the learning process as an indivisible relationship between the teacher and the student (de Riba, 2020; de Riba & Revelles-Benavente, 2019; Hickey-Moody, Palmer & Sayers, 2016).
One way to include technologies in our pedagogical approaches is through gamification. According to the European program Horizon, gamification is fundamental for learning processes at very different levels of education (Chou, Chang & Hsieh, 2020). Game-based learning (GML) has widely proven to be beneficial for the students and the effects of the learning processes are categorized “into knowledge acquisition, and affective and motivational outcomes” (Chou, Chang & Hsieh, 2020, p. 1). In these regards, Parra-González, Segura-Robles, y López-Alcarria (2020, p. 11) add that gamification provides students with “motivation, participation, better learning results and a better development.1” Nevertheless, the methodology of gamification does not always require technological equipment or technology itself (Denvers & Gurung, 2015) although it can be a very good motivational string especially in the online classes.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Capacity: The opportunities that students can create to help themselves and each other as a group instead of individually.
Active Methodologies: Teaching methodologies that include the student as part of the design and implementation of the syllabus.
Affects: Visible and invisible forces that connect students, professors, the classroom, and the discipline in an indivisible continuum in order to create a learning environment that escapes from hierarchies of knowledge.
Critical Thinking: Engaging with the society around us in order to promote a social transformation by thinking affirmatively, that is using critique in a constructive way.
Affective Pedagogies: Pedagogies that engage with affects instead of emotions in order to start focusing on processes instead of evaluative results.
Safe Space: An environment in the classroom in which differences are respected and engaged with and not used as tools to discriminate against each other.