James Paul Gee
James Gee (/dʒiː/; born April 15, 1948) is a retired American researcher who has worked in psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy.
Gee has previously been a faculty affiliate of the Games, Learning, and Society group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison[2] and is a member of the National Academy of Education.
He started his career in theoretical linguistics, working in syntactic and semantic theory, and taught initially at Stanford University and later in the School of Language and Communication at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
[4][5] In 2007, Gee relocated to Arizona State University, where he was the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
When discussing the combination of language with other social practices (behavior, values, ways of thinking, clothes, food, customs, perspectives) within a specific group, Gee refers to that as Discourse.
[10] Second, Gee proposes that reading and writing (the ‘meat’ of literacy according to the traditional notion of the term) are not such obvious ideas as they first appear.
Furthermore, Gee also argues that reading and writing should be viewed as more than just “mental achievements” happening inside people's minds; they should also be seen as “social and cultural practices with economic, historical, and political implications”.
By this, he means “any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.)
[13] There is a seemingly endless and varied range of semiotic domains, including (but certainly not limited to) cellular biology, first-person-shooter video games, rap music, or modernist painting.
In short, this theoretical and methodological orientation emphasizes studying language-in-use and literacies within their contexts of social practice.
Gee's current work in the field of new literacies has seen him shift in his research focus somewhat from studying language-in-use to examining the D/iscourses of a range of new social practices—with a particular emphasis on video games and learning.
[10] This theoretical orientation aligns with work in the broad field of "new literacies" research—by colleagues such as Colin Lankshear, Michele Knobel, Henry Jenkins, Kevin Leander, Rebecca Black, Kurt Squire, and Constance Steinkuehler, among others.
[14] Gee condenses and clusters these principles even more closely in an article [15] following the publication of his video games and learning book.
Thus, Gee organizes the condensed list of good learning principles in three student-centered, classroom-friendly clusters: “Empowered Learners; Problem Solving; Understanding" (p. 6).
[15] Under Empowered Learners, Gee includes the learning principles of “co-design,” “customize,” “identity,” and “manipulation and distributed knowledge.” These principles incorporate the idea that an engaged student is active in designing and customizing their own learning experience, can learn by taking on new identities (e.g. in explore career paths or specialized skill sets in simulated roles), and feels “more expanded and empowered when they can manipulate powerful tools in intricate ways that extend their area of effectiveness" (p. 8).
For each of these levels, Gee specifies key elements (present in the latter four learning principles): carefully prioritized information, relevant and applicable facts, and a set of related skills with which to construct strategies in a safe and authentic context.
While the person has no control over the sex they were born with, this identity only means something because society and culture say this biological difference is important.
