Abstract
This article relies on nonrepresentational narrative research to consider improvisational urban literacy. The author uses narrative to theorize the choice to teach Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in urban high school English classrooms. The author positions this decision as the surprising result of an improvisational, urban literacy pedagogy meant to locate and address issues of race and gender in a video game. This article calls for a broader view of textuality that affirms, supports, and celebrates emergent teacher decision making, as well as practices of urban literacy education that broaden the notion of what constitutes a text.
Introduction
My former high school student Stephan 1 sent me a Facebook message.
“I still think about reading Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 9th grade English, Mr. Tanner,” Stephan wrote. “I always think about resisting the narrative that all Black men are thugs.”
I was surprised to learn that, nearly 15 years later, Stephan was still thinking about something that we did in his 9th grade English class. Honestly, I often thought about teaching Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in high school too. In Stephan’s class, yes, but in countless other sections over the next 15 years. Adding that game to my curriculum was a surprising thing that happened during my career as a high school teacher.
Before going any further, I want to make it clear that I am a White man. Stephan was Black, and many of the other students mentioned below identified as People of Color. I have spent years working to grow smarter about how my Whiteness has impacted my work as an urban high school teacher, a literacy education scholar, and how I move through the world (see Tanner, 2016a, 2019). I have created and studied teaching projects for White elementary and high school students to engage them in making better sense of Whiteness (see Tanner, 2016b, 2018). Indeed, teaching Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in High-School English was one of the many pedagogical ways I tried to facilitate explicit discussions of race. I do not share this work to pretend at some sort of superior, racialized conscientiousization. I refer to it because I have spent years, as I have written previously, “wondering how” my Whiteness colors my ability “to relate to people of color with integrity” (Tanner, 2019, p. 196). I am certain my Whiteness colors my relationship with Stephan as I return to his words here. I know my Whiteness situates this work, as it does any other educational research produced by White people. I ask the reader to move through the stories and analysis below with this reflexive note about my subjectivity in mind—my Whiteness is present in the stories I tell and interpret below, and likely one of the reasons I was not fired for my teaching.
This nontraditional article is inspired by Stephen’s message to me and emerges as a reaction against overly prescriptive and rational understandings of literacy. It considers the affordances and limitations of bringing a more improvisational view of textuality, pedagogy, and research to the field of urban education. Throughout, I take seriously Leander and Boldt’s (2013) concern that much of what has been done in the last 25 years in literacy education emerged out of New London Group’s (1996) “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” and has overemphasized design discourses—both in terms of texts and people. Leander and Boldt (2013) argued this emphasis on design has led to an “unmarked collapsing of pedagogy and research” that “has limited our awareness of the rationalized and interventionist assertions” (p. 24) and resulted in prescriptive domestications of what is possible in literacy teaching and research. As both theory and method, this article resists what Leander and Boldt (2013) described as the “disciplined rationalization” of “engagement in literacies” (p. 22) and offers an alternative kind of research that embraces Leander and Boldt (2013) notion of “non-representational emergence” (p. 25).
Below, I offer a brief overview of multiliteracies research in relation to textuality. Next, I describe the nonrepresentational, narrative methodology utilized throughout this article. Finally, I proceed with storytelling and story interpretation meant to provoke thinking around an improvisational, vital urban literacy pedagogy in relation to text, textuality, and text selection. Ultimately, this article uses narrative research to consider the following questions:
What are the possibilities and limitations of improvisational urban literacy education?
What is an improvisational view of text and textuality?
Toward Polymodality Urban Literacy Education
Over the last 20 years, a multiliteracies view of literacy education has become increasingly accepted. A multiliteracies approach, according to Stornaiuolo et al. (2009), is one that understands “literacy as a negotiation of multiple linguistic and cultural differences through the design and redesign processes” (p. 382). Jacobs (2013) wrote that, “when discussing multiliteracies, we are referring not only to the multiple modes through which people engage in ideas but also to the multiple contexts in which language is used” (p. 270). In this section, I review work that extends this understanding of the multiliteracies beyond multimodality into what Boldt (2020) recently described as polymodal attunement. Next, I turn to work in gaming literacy and urban education with the concept of polymodality in mind. This section presents these topics in relation to improvisation and pedagogy to prepare the reader to rethink text and textuality in the vignettes below and, for me, offers a way to honor, wonder about, and take seriously Stephan’s message to me.
Beyond a Multiliteracies Framework
A multiliteracies framework has been crucial in allowing literacy scholars to, as Jacobs (2013) wrote, “recognize the wide variety of texts in which people are engaged and the range of contexts within which meaning making occurs” (p. 28). Still, Jacobs (2013) argued that Leander and Boldt’s (2013) critique of a multiliteracies framework illustrates “an inherently text-centric approach to viewing the world” and an “overrationalization of youth engagement in texts, which in turn limits what we are able to see” (p. 271). Specifically, Leander and Boldt (2013) wrote with the aim of reasserting “the sensations and movements of the body in the moment-by-moment unfolding or emergence of activity” into literacy education (p. 22). They described their nonrepresentational approach as a way to understand “literacy activity as not projected toward some textual end point, but as living its life in the ongoing present, forming relations and connections across signs, objects, and bodies in often unexpected ways” (p. 26). Ultimately, Leander and Boldt’s (2013) critique provokes a more improvisational understanding of the way people interact with text and textuality, and invites a pedagogy in which the teacher makes “space for fluidity and indeterminacy as the nature of things” and recognizes “difference, surprise, and unfolding that follow along paths that are not rational or linear or obviously critical or political” (p. 44).
Powell’s (2016) view of multimodality also evokes an improvisational understanding of textuality in relation to literacy pedagogy by asserting that “meaning and intention are emergent rather than linear, suggesting the entanglement of situation, objects, meanings, and the ways in which they arise out of ongoing activity” (p. 414). Powell’s multimodal understanding of text moves beyond the centering of design in a multiliteracies framework by arguing that meaning and intention are emergent, unpredictable, and unfold over time. In other words, this is an understanding of multimodality in which literacy activity is engaged, studied, and felt as the ongoing entanglement of signs as they produce more signs. Boldt (2020) goes further in naming a view polymodality in which “teaching and learning are everywhere” and “take place irrespective of that which is understood to be curricular” (p. 10). Boldt (2020) argues toward vitality rights in literacy that “does not belong to any one sensory modality but can arise in relation to any and all, in many combinations” (p. 10). Boldt argues we should be in search of “classroom scenes of vitality” in which “teachers and researchers are aware, at various levels of consciousness, of rising and falling energy” (p. 11). This provocation asks the teacher to take up an improvisational pedagogy where in some instances, we make use of the energy, moving with it, heightening and extending it, and we can feel attunement, vitality, flow, and momentum. In other instances, the classroom space feels disjointed, stuck, out of tune, or dead. In yet other circumstances, we ignore or even punish in response to expressions of energy, experiencing them as distractions or disruptions (p. 11).
Such an approach to literacy pedagogy would, to my mind, call into question traditional notions of textuality and the teacher’s role in designing prescriptive, predetermined encounters between students and texts.
Gaming Literacy
Jacobs (2013) worried that the term muliliteracies has become “almost synonymous with digital technology use and the use of popular media” (p. 271). Zimmerman (2009) saw that gaming literacy was more than a novel way to incorporate multimodal technology in the classroom but, instead, tied to an emergent “approach to literacy” that relies on “a new set of cognitive, creative, and social skills” (p. 25). For Zimmerman (2009), video games function as “possibility spaces” that present players with the opportunity to attempt and “understand and create specific kinds of meanings” (pp. 24–25). Importantly, Zimmerman (2009) argues that gaming literacy is not about disseminating prescriptive, rhetorical, or educational texts—it is not about “serious games” that teach subject matter, a social agenda, or prepare students to be game designers. (p. 24). Instead, Zimmerman (2009) argues that gaming literacy is a social practice and requires “an emerging set of skills and competencies” that emerge out of participating in any game (p. 23).
Gillern’s (2016) work to develop a framework for gaming follows such an understanding of gaming literacy. Gillern (2016) argued the need to “illuminate the complexities of modern video gaming” and study “the impressiveness of gamers in their ability to constantly perceive, decide, and make video games their own” (p. 680). Vance (2017) extended this thinking to teaching and learning by arguing that gaming literacy offers a multimodal pedagogy in which students might think “critically about writing” as well as “their own lives” (p. 133). An improvisational multimodal or polymodal view of gaming literacy provokes us to pay attention to something more than the words, images, or discrete encounter between player and text and, perhaps, offers a way to rethink the textuality of gaming literacy as a potentially affective experience.
Polymodality in Urban Literacy
A traditional pedagogy of multiliteracies often reinforces a status quo that accepts prescriptive understandings of textuality. Indeed, Bain (2006) worried that that “we lack examples of successful classroom alternatives” that challenge “the ritualized and traditional deference that students afford to the authority of texts and teachers” (p. 2080). Specifically of urban literacy education, Kirkland (2014) argued that many in urban literacy now consider literacy “to be the ability to locate, elevate, use, and communicate using a wide range of resources including texts and visual, audio, and video sources” (p. 394). Such an argument creates space to reimagine textuality in the ways discussed above. Certainly, there’s a need to address Kirkland’s (2014) following question: “How might urban literacy educators and researchers expand social conceptions of literacy by examining the intersections of multiple forms of oppression, including racism, sexism, and economic oppression within texts” (p. 407). A more improvisational, polymodal understanding of textuality provides one way to think about Kirkland’s question in relation to pedagogy.
Powell and Serriere’s (2013) described improvisational pedagogy as “the reconstitution of curriculum as embodied, experiential, and fluid, moving beyond a pre-planned syllabus or package of materials” (p. 21). The stories below are intended as a way to think through emergent literacy activity in a high school classroom that, as illustrated by Stephan’s message to me 15 years later, continued to move beyond a classroom or an intended outcome. Milner and Lomotey (2013) wrote of the need for scholarship and practice in urban education that might “address race and poverty in terms of how they intersect and manifest independently inside and outside of school” (p. xvi). Stephan’s comment illustrated that the grappling we did with race, gender, and poverty by reading a game together was still with him in a space and time far removed from a discrete classroom event.
Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) worried that we are at “a significant juncture in our cultural meaning-making practices” with both “texts” and “the very nature of textuality itself” and that “as people engage in mobile and digital communicative practices across vast differences and distances, what constitutes a text is undergoing significant cultural redefinition” (p. 315). Polymodality in concert with an improvisational view of pedagogy offers one way to rethink textuality in urban literacy education. Thomas and Stornaiuolo’s (2016) called for “a more expansive definition of what constitutes textuality” in the ways that “that stories are told, circulated, and retold” (p. 315). I extend this provocation to academic research and turn to nonrepresentational narrative methods as a way to continue with this consideration of text and textuality.
Nonrepresentational Narrative Research
Leander and Boldt (2013) worried that representational research—the idea that activity can be objectively captured with words—is limiting and often leads to the reproduction of overcoded or prescriptive structures. Leander and Boldt (2013) offered an example of nonrepresentative research that hoped to “foster unpredictable connections in the present for the researcher or the reader” and subvert “that we should be seeking to represent what actually happened or to locate causality in the subject or the event” (p. 25). I turn to narrative methods as a way to experiment with nonrepresentational research.
Narrative research is a qualitative approach in which the author shares and interprets personal stories to make sense of experience (Barone, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Anne Turvey (2012) argued that narrative scholarship renders visible “the messy and wonderfully productive complexity of classrooms” (p. 57). Many art-based educational researchers have turned to autoethnographic and fictional storytelling as a way to understand and theorize complex experience (Barone, 2010; Barone & Eisner, 2012; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1977; Leavy, 2013; Maynard & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010; Rolling, 2013; Saks, 1996). Zirps (2016) went so far as to use the genre of the postmodern novel as a way to work “between and within the worlds of theory and research” to explore “complex questions about racism” in urban education (p. 3). The stories below are not fictional. They are rooted in journals and notes that documented my experience as a teacher. Still, the creative license I take in my storying of those notes honors Zirps’ (2016) experimentation with form. Specifically, the reader will encounter manufactured dialogue. This dialogue is inspired by things students and other adults said that I jotted down in my journals. Still, the dialogue serves a utilitarian and aesthetic purpose—it becomes a way to invite the reader into a time and place with me to share my experience. I want to be clear that the storying here is a nonrepresentational interpretation of previous writing that documented my teaching experience and is intended to create new thinking through this article.
Storytelling is a particularly appropriate way to think through and feel this rethinking of textuality because it accounts for complex experience across time and space. According to John Dewey, theory or knowledge in the absence of experience is rendered incoherent. Indeed, Dewey (1916/2011) wrote An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and verifiable significance. An experience, a very humble experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of theory (or intellectual content), but a theory apart from an experience cannot be definitely grasped even as theory. (p. 169)
This passage by Dewey, written over a century ago, argues that theory requires experience to be understood. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) wrote that “education and educational studies are a form of experience” and “narrative is the best way of representing and understanding experience” (p. 18). Storytelling seems especially appropriate for this article about textuality because, according to Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016), “texts cannot be separated from their social contexts of production and interpretation” and “are always materialized through and situation in relation to our social and cultural activities and tools” (pp. 315–316).
To write the vignettes below, I returned to teaching notes—I kept journals throughout my 15 years as a high school English teacher. First, I read my entries about teaching Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that included specific things students said or did as we played and analyzed the game. Next, I examined artifacts such as lesson plans, readings I selected for students, and notes about particular classes. I continued by creating a timeline that began with my decision to teach the game and ended with Stephan’s comment. I identified themes such as vitality, emergence, improvisation, and textuality. These topics allowed me to select and sort relevant student comments as well as descriptive and reflective excerpts from my teaching notes. Finally, I created a series of chronological vignettes that developed and emerged as I made sense of the stories in relation to my topics. This process relied on Erickson’s (1986) articulation of interpretive fieldwork and allowed me to interpret the material both during and after the storying process. Ultimately, I created two analytical categories to understand my stories—vital textuality and improvisational emergence. These categories are discussed after I share the vignettes below.
I want to make it clear that this article is an experimentation with nonrepresentational, narrative research. I’m not intending to, as Leander and Boldt (2013) wrote, “represent what actually happened or to locate causality in the subject or the event” (p. 25). Instead, this article takes what was discussed about multimodality and polymodality above seriously and, modeled after previous work on improvisational literacy (see Tanner, 2017), is intended as an experience in and of itself to inspire the reader to think about the possibilities and pitfalls of improvisational urban literacy education.
Storying My Decision to Teach Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a controversial action-adventure video game released in 2004. I studied and critiqued Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for over 10 years with high school students in relation to required, canonical works such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Black Boy. It was my intention in using Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to complicate units on racial narratives. I also wanted to disrupt traditional notions of what type of text is worthy of study in a classroom. This work happened in 9th and 11th grade English classes across two urban and suburban high schools in a major city in the Midwest.
Before continuing, I acknowledge writing about teaching an edition of Grand Theft Auto may elicit a reaction from the reader. Certainly, students were often shocked to learn we would be “reading” Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in English class. Colleagues were frequently astonished by my decision to teach the game, and it is important to include that tension in this article. Improvisational literacy pedagogy can be disruptive. I was careful to provide my rationale at the time for including the game in class and will offer the reader similar explanations throughout this article—though my understanding of the literacy activity has certainly changed as I have crafted the stories here. Ultimately, I appreciate that teaching this text, laden with satirical and overtly stereotypical depictions of race, gender, and violence was and remains problematic. There was potential to affirm the same oppressive logics I was hoping to undermine through my choice to teach this text, especially in relation to my positionality as a White man, which I ask the reader to keep in mind. Still, both then and now, I saw the game as a possibility space to notice, critique, and empower people to resist normalizing logics of identity—especially in relation to race and gender are in the United States.
I proceed by describing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in more detail. Next, I share vignettes to represent both the choice to use this game, the experience of reading it with students, and things that emerged after including it in my curriculum. Three asterisks (***) are used to signal movement between time and space in the storytelling. I then think through the vignettes in relation to vital textuality and improvisational emergence. Ultimately, I build an argument for a broader view of textuality in literacy classrooms, especially in reaction against the increasing uniformity of literacy curriculum in schools. Crafting and making sense of the stories here reminds me that classrooms can be used as improvisational spaces to grapple with how identity is shaped by narratives contained in increasingly complex, textual fields. Furthermore, I contend that teachers should be encouraged and supported to make improvisational decisions as they facilitate encounters between students and text, even when those improvisations are disruptive.
Certainly, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was a disruptive text to bring to my high school English class in 2004.
Grant Theft Auto: San Andreas as a Literary Work
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is an action-adventure video game released by Rockstar Games in 2004. It is played from a third-person perspective in an open-world environment that allows the player to explore the world as they choose. The game takes place in satirical representations of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, and is set in the early 1990s. The story centers on Carl “CJ” Johnson as he returns home after his mother’s death. The player guides CJ as he re-establishes connections with old friends, deals with corrupt police officers, and attempts to discover who murdered his mother. The complex, open-world environment allows the player to control Carl’s physical appearance, his clothing, the food he eats, and his relationships with characters in the world of the game. The player, should they decide to do so, is able to wreak havoc on the cities mentioned above. Still, players are punished when they break the law and, as Borchard (2015) wrote in an autoethnographic exploration of playing Grand Theft Auto, the game does not reward senseless violence which happens with “a player who isn’t very good at or doesn’t understand how to do well in the game” (p. 449). Notably, CJ is the only Black protagonist in the Grand Theft Auto series and, frankly, in most major video game releases of that era. Certainly, this racial aspect of the game was central to my decision to bring it to class.
Scholars have turned to the Grand Theft Auto series to better understand the games as complex, literary works. In fact, Ruch (2012) argued that, with the Grand Theft Auto series, “Rockstar Games have called upon a new medium, with its own rhetorics to simulate the experience of modern urban life in some of the world’s largest cities” (p. 332). Furthermore, Ruch (2012) claimed that the structure of Grant Theft Auto games, that is their form and content, are “an answer to many of the questions modernist writers asked of their medium in attempting to represent the new experiences of modern life” (p. 332). Ruch acknowledged that it is possible to interact with Grand Theft Auto games as only an expression of exaggerated aggression and violence, but also suggested that there are “particular meanings inscribed into a video game that only become salient when the game is actively played, tested, and experienced” (p. 334). Actively teasing out these themes by reading the game closely, for Ruch, allows the player to see that the Grand Theft Auto games are “a project begun by the modernist writers before them. The game shows not only that the American Dream narrative is a myth but also that the city has no particular interest in the narrative of any one individual” (p. 346).
Other scholars have used new literacy studies to better understand Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Indeed, DeVane and Squire (2008) turned to the game, in part, because “works of literature are most rewarding when they allow the reader agency in productive meaning making” (p. 269) and this is what they felt was happening when people played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. DeVane and Squire (2008) went so far as to wonder if Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas could “provide marginalized youth spaces where they have increased agency in a semiotic system that actually matters to them?” (p. 265). Certainly, this questions frames stories I share below about first deciding to bring this game to my mostly Black 9th graders who were, at the time, enthusiastic about the game before they read it with me in class. Ultimately, DeVane and Squire (2008) argued that most people are concerned “with the symbolic content of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, but few have examined how inhabiting a socioeconomic system in the game space remediates players’ understandings of phenomena outside the game” (p. 282). They went on to claim that although the game has many problematic aspects, “the ability of some players to ‘read’ sophisticated critiques of social, political, and commercial institutions suggests that the game’s semiotics and overarching narrative may have more depth than its critics allow” (pp. 282–283). In other words, like a complex novel, poem, or film, there are sophisticated critiques and themes available in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, but the player needs to play the game carefully to engage, understand, and critique them. It was my intent, in choosing to bring the game to my high school students, to better read this game that so many of them were already engrossed with anyway.
Narrative: Storying My Decision to Teach Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
I purchased Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for my PlayStation 2 soon after it came out. However, I did not have time to play it. I was too occupied with my second year of teaching high school English at Cardinal High School. 2
Cardinal was located in a first-ring suburb of a major city in the Midwest. Cardinal was a diverse school with an increasing African American population when I arrived as a 23-year-old teacher in 2003. Most of my students identified as Black and made it clear to me that I was, in no uncertain terms, White. I spent my first 2 years as a high school teacher, among other things, grappling with my Whiteness and its relationship to my work as a teacher (see Tanner, 2016b).
I have been playing video games since my father purchased our first Nintendo in 1987. I find comfort in solitary activities. Reading Toni Morrison or playing Super Mario World are, among other things, restorative for me. In my first years as a teacher, I would often return to my apartment after school, collapse on my couch, and play Final Fantasy XI or John Madden Football before going to bed early to wake up and teach the next morning.
My students were well aware of my affinity for video games. I hid little about myself from them. Colleagues often warned me about creating boundaries with my students, but I could not seem to help being open in my classes. It came up that I owned Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas one morning in a section of 9th grade English.
“San Andreas,” Stephan told me. “Mr. Tanner, I love that game. 3 ”
“I haven’t really played it yet,” I admitted.
Other students came over to listen to our conversation.
“I’m amazing at that game, Mr. Tanner,” Lorenzo bragged.
“You actually own San Andreas, Mr. Tanner?” Vashayla said with laughter. “Teachers don’t play that game.”
I shrugged.
“You got to play, Tanner,” Stephan told me. “San Andreas is great.”
“I’m too busy planning your English class to play video games,” I told my students with sardonic laughter.
Word spread quickly. Countless students came to talk with me about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that day. I was surprised that admitting I owned a specific video game elicited such a reaction from my students.
I came down with the flu a few weeks later. I did not take good care of myself early in my career, mostly because I was so absorbed with my teaching. I took a sick day that fall. I purposely tried not to think about my classes during my day off. Instead, I played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
I was immediately drawn into the rich, problematic world of the game. CJ’s story was captivating, and I was enthralled by San Andreas’ complexity. I had played previous versions of the Grand Theft Auto series, but San Andreas was so sophisticated. CJ gained weight because of eating unhealthy fast-food. He could purchase a gaudy hat at a boutique. He could even take a walk through the woods at night. It felt as though I were transported to a ridiculous, yet familiar universe. My disbelief was suspended.
I listened to the radio as CJ drove through Los Santos. Some stations featured songs by Ice Cube, Eazy-E, and Dr. Dre. Other channels offered satirical talk radio bits or advertisements that were, in a word, hilarious. Yes, there was violence and destruction around me, but the game seemed self-aware of its exaggerated portrayal of Los Angeles in the early 1990s. I was shocked to see that San Andreas was, in many ways, smart.
What most captured my attention was the racial dynamics in the game. I had been deeply wrestling with my own Whiteness, especially in relation to my mostly Black students. I was reading Stuart Hall and growing more interested in how histories of race informed contemporary racial identities. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas required me to play as a Black man in a world that was rampant with oppression, criminality, and logics of White supremacy. It also placed me in what I read as a Black world—a world that felt similar to Cardinal High School. The game conjured Hall’s devastating critiques about how racial narratives were fed by media in the 19th and 20th century, and purposely portrayed Black men as violent, dangerous, and a threat to innocent White people. Indeed, the police in the game were my adversaries, and all of them were White. Characters on the street seemed like caricatures of racial stereotypes—Black characters were violent and aggressive, whereas White characters were weak and clueless. Japanese characters were part of the Yakuza gang, many of the women on the street were hyper-sexualized, and identities were exaggerated to the point of ridiculous parody. I felt uncomfortable playing the game at first. As I played, I noticed that the game seemed reflexive of these racial and gendered social discourses as characters made self-aware comments that poked fun at their broad, stereotypical, and exaggerated identities. There was space to notice and think differently about logics of identity. As Stephan would put it years later, there was space to resist narratives.
In short, there was so much to take in as a casual player of this video game. It occurred to me that so many of the discussions I had been having about race, class, and gender in my 9th grade English class were present in the cartoonish, exaggerated world of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. And while coercing my students to read To Kill A Mockingbird was a daily struggle, so many of these same students were playing (or watching somebody else play) Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in their homes.
I decided, that afternoon, that I wanted to talk with my 9th graders more seriously about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
***
“Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas? That game has set race relations in this country back twenty years,” Aaron told me with a wry smile.
I laughed. Aaron was a White senior. He was on the improv theater troupe I directed in the after-school drama program. We were talking before school. Students in the drama program often hung out in my classroom. I taught in an enormous, black box theater. Students gravitated toward this space. I had told Aaron about playing the game during my day off.
“I want to talk about San Andreas with my 9th graders,” I told him. “I might even bring it in so we can analyze it.”
Aaron laughed. “Don’t tell Ms. Lichtenberg.”
Ms. Lichtenberg was the school’s principal. Aaron was worried I would get in trouble for teaching the game.
I began my first section of 9th grade English that morning by telling the students that I had finally played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
“You skipped school to play video games?” Stephan teased me.
“My immune system is shutting down because I’m working so hard to teach you,” I replied playfully. “I needed some time off.”
“What did you think of the game, Mr. Tanner?” Vashayla asked me seriously.
“Well,” I replied casually, “Do you really want to know? It was fun, but the identities of the characters in the game floored me. Race and gender stereotypes were so extreme. The game is really carefully constructed. The creators put a lot of thought and work into it.”
We had more informal conversation. Students were hanging on my words. It was clear that most of them had played or were familiar with the game. Finally, I asked the class a more pointed question.
“What do you think about race in the game? Or the way it portrays gender?”
“Oh, Mr. Tanner you’re crazy. It’s just a video game. I don’t think about it,” Lorenzo said. “I just play.”
“Yeah, Mr. Tanner,” Vashayla said. “Nobody thinks about that when they play. You over analyze everything. You’re such an English teacher.”
I laughed at Vashayla’s lighthearted remark.
Vashayla’s comment convinced me to bring the game into class. The idea that my students were playing this text without making sense of its complexity, especially in relation to race, troubled me. We were discussing race in our required reading. I wanted them to extend their thinking to the texts they interacted with in their everyday lives, outside of school.
I designed curriculum to support bringing the game to class. I used the idea of racial narratives as a point of departure to conceptualize how I might present the game to students. The following day, I shared a quote from Stuart Hall that suggested that people tell the stories they have been told, and our identities extend from those narratives. I then gave students a journal prompt that asked them what stories they were told and perpetuated about race. Next, students read a review of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that I found online. The reviewer wrote about the “thuggish” and “criminal” world of the game. We discussed the ways that the review affirmed the narrative that Black men in America (and Black neighborhoods in the game) were inherently violent, criminal, and dangerous. Finally, I brought my PlayStation 2 into class.
I hooked the console up to the projector before school and tested the game. The students hanging out in my classroom before school were astonished that I was projecting Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on an enormous screen in my classroom.
Lorenzo and Stephan showed up to class early. They were usually late.
“Are we playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas today, Mr. Mr. Tanner?” Lorenzo asked.
“We’re reading it,” I reminded him.
“Okay,” Stephan said.
“You’re a weird teacher, Mr. Tanner,” Lorenzo told me with a big smile.
Students shuffled in and, after the bell rang, I had them take out their journals. I asked the class to name all the racial categories they could. Students came up with White or Caucasian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Other. I had them list those terms in their notebooks.
“We’re paying attention to race,” I reminded my class, “but it’s impossible to avoid the gender dynamics in this text. So please list ‘gender’ as a category in your notebook as well.”
I told students that, as we played the game, I wanted them to write down anything they noticed about these categories in their notes.
“The way characters are dressed, the way they talk, the way they interact, the setting. Pay attention to everything you see and hear in the game.”
“Next, I reminded students of our guiding question, “What stories are being told about race in this game? How are we confirming or subverting those stories through the way we place the game? Anything you write down in your notes can be used as evidence in the discussion we’re going to have later.”
Finally, I sat on a stool near the projector cart, turned my PlayStation 2 on, and clutched the controller. Students watched quietly as the title screen appeared. The image of a scantily clad White woman with her mouth open seductively appeared. Next, a group of young Black men in baggy pants and chains emerged. Students furiously scribbled notes into their journals. I was surprised by their intense engagement. Every student in the class seemed to pay rapt attention.
After the introductory cut-scenes, I explained the conventions of the game. I showed students a map of the game world, talked about CJ’s health meter, and pointed out different aspects of gameplay. Next, mindful that I was going to avoid any gratuitously violence or overt sexuality in my play, I simply walked CJ through the world of the game. Students took notes. I pointed out specific aspects of the game that stood out to me as students watched. A White character wearing a suit and tie commented on CJ’s race as he walked by, all of the police in the game were White, CJ’s neighborhood was rundown, the driver of a pickup truck was a White man listening to country music, the driver of a low rider was Latino and listening to rap, White people hung out in one neighborhood, Black people in another, and Asians in still another, an so on. There was so much to notice about the game.
“When are you going break the law, Mr. Mr. Tanner?” Stephan shouted from his desk.
“CJ’s just living his life,” I told Stephan with a wry smile. “Why do you want him to commit a crime?”
Stephan laughed loudly.
The most criminal thing that CJ did that day was to run a red light as I drove through Los Santos. Students watched intently for 50 minutes as we peacefully explored the game. I did this in all of my sections of 9th grade English that day.
I had students compare, talk about, and organize their notes before participating in a structured discussion about the game the next day. Their conversation about the text was rich, especially as they connected what they noticed in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas with our discussion about narratives of race and the criminality of Black men.
“The game just goes with the narrative that all Black men are thugs,” Stephan said during the discussion.
“Yes, but the game subverts the narrative too,” Vashayla replied. “You don’t have to play it as a thug. Mr. Tanner was just walking around peacefully. And some Black characters aren’t thugs.”
“Yeah, but if you want to pass the missions and beat the game, you got to be a criminal.”
“So, the game is telling the story that Black people have to be criminals to survive,” Lorenzo said.
The class also took up gender dynamics during the discussion.
“Women are just another thing for CJ to get in the game,” a student named Sarah told the class. “Like money or food or whatever.”
“Yes, but there are strong women too,” Vashayla said with laughter. “CJ’s sister doesn’t mess around.”
I was surprised by the thoughtful, engaged conversations students participated in that day across all of my sections of 9th grade English. I did not push my classes toward consensus in their interpretation of the game. Instead, as with any work of literature I might teach, I encouraged them to think through the game in relation to the question I posed before viewing the text. Getting these students to discuss To Kill A Mockingbird was often like pulling teeth. These same teenagers did not want to stop talking about race and gender in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Their discussions about identity and narratives continued after the bell rang. They kept talking in the halls.
If nothing else, I was convinced that bringing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to my students in 9th grade English at Cardinal that day afforded us a powerful medium through which to discuss and think about narratives of race and gender.
***
Years passed and I continued using Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in my 9th grade English classes at Cardinal. We would spend a day reading the game in class. I would prompt students to analyze San Andreas in relation to other required texts we encountered through their writing and discussion. Analyzing this game with students became a part of my teaching practice, especially in thinking through how identities are informed by socially constructed narratives.
Eventually, I was recruited to teach at Primville Area High School (PAHS), a suburban school on the other side of the city. PAHS was located in a more affluent school district. Most of the students at PAHS were White when I began teaching there in 2007.
I was assigned to teach sections of 11th grade American Literature. Black Boy by Richard Wright was a required text in this class. I thought that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas would be an ideal companion text to use with Black Boy. Wright’s rich, elegant depiction of White neighborhoods and Black neighborhoods in urban areas, for me, conjured the way that San Andreas lampooned racial segregation in Los Santos. Furthermore, Wright used his memoir to work through and critique similar racial narratives that San Andreas also satirizes—especially around White and Black identity.
Students and colleagues at Cardinal had grown accustomed to my use of nontraditional texts in English class. I brought music, ads, films, and other games to analyze with students. Bringing this same openness to alternative literature to PAHS proved difficult. My colleagues were skeptical when I told them about using San Andreas in class.
“You can’t bring video games to class,” my assigned mentor said to me firmly. This was after I told him about teaching the text.
“Why?” I asked. “I used the game at Cardinal.”
“It might have been okay been okay to play video games at Cardinal,” he told me dismissively. “PAHS is a more rigorous school.”
I was shaken by my mentor’s words. His suggestion that the analysis of a nontraditional text was invalid because PAHS was a superior school troubled me. PAHS was a Whiter school, for sure. But superior? My colleague thought the use of a multimodal text was not legitimate in an English classroom. I was somewhat offended by my mentor’s advice and made the choice to use San Andreas in 11th grade English anyway. Using the game to discuss race felt like an important, powerful tool I had developed in my teaching practice.
My students at PAHS were as astonished as those at Cardinal had been when they saw my PlayStation 2 hooked up to a projector cart.
“We’re playing video games today?” Johnathon asked.
“We’re reading a text,” I said.
The students at PAHS, though they shared little in common with my students at Cardinal, were just as engaged. We took notes on gender, race, and class in the game. Their observations fueled our discussions about Wright’s memoir, yes, but they also led us into conversations about racial narratives at PAHS. I had been assured that PAHS took racial equity very seriously when I was hired by the district. It surprised me to learn, during our discussion about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, that students referred to the hallway outside the main office as “Compton Corner” because the Black student hung out there. They called the area at the top of one stairwell “Hmong Mountain” because that’s where the Hmong students hung out.
“All the white kids hang out near the band hallway,” Johnathon said during one of our structured discussions about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. “Our school is just like the game. There are different neighborhoods that have different narratives. And they’re mostly separated by race.”
“Yes,” Kaela added, “but that’s just like our city. Different races live in different suburbs.”
“That’s what Richard writes about in the book,” Davon said. “Being in different neighborhoods is like being in different racial narratives.”
I was impressed by the way my new students at PAHS were able to work through the connections between these texts and their own realities in relation to broader narratives and social structures. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas worked as a provocative text that afforded us a particular way to engage discussions about contemporary narratives, especially regarding race.
The principal at PAHS made an unannounced visit to my classroom one morning during my second year at the school.
“I heard you were playing video games during class,” she told me coldly. “I wanted to see if that was true.”
I was unnerved by the principal’s unexpected observation but, in fact, we were reading San Andreas that day. I told her as much, and proceeded as I would have if she were not in the room.
My principal was silent as I presented the game. Students took notes, we shared our thoughts, and the class informally discussed the text in relation to narratives of race and gender. My principal left toward the end of the period without saying a word.
“Are you in trouble, Mr. Tanner?” one of my students asked after the principal was gone.
I laughed weakly. “I don’t know.”
The principal never spoke to me about the observation, but I had the sense she was skeptical of my use of the game.
Years later, the English department chair asked me to stop by her classroom.
“What’s up?” I asked as I sat down to talk with the department chair.
“I heard you play video games in American Lit?” she asked me with disdain.
I briefly described my use of the text.
My chair seemed more open after I explained how I used the game.
“That seems legitimate, Sam,” she told me. “Apparently, my student teacher’s fiancé is in the army. He and his friends play Grand Theft Auto when they aren’t on duty. He’s in Iraq. My student teacher was really offended that you were playing that game in class.”
“That part of why I want to use the text,” I told the chair. “I want to teach students how to critically examine the games that are being played around. Especially the ones that, to me, seem problematic.”
The English Department chair was not overly enthusiastic. She was far more traditional in her view of textuality than I was. Still, she admitted she saw validity in my choice to use the game.
Teaching Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in a high school English class required me to be cautious with colleagues, administrators and, of course, my students. Still, I found that, in the context of my localized work as a teacher, the game offered a possibility space that helped us think about, discuss, and analyze narratives—especially in relation to race, gender, and class—with high school students.
Interpreting My Decision to Teach Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
I imagine the vignettes above unearth many questions and, perhaps, even concerns for the reader. In some ways, this was my point in sharing the stories above. Indeed, I take Barone’s (2000) claim that “some stories deserve their own space” and that we “do not always need, within the same textual breath, to deconstruct in another style and format the epiphanies they foster” seriously (p. 259). Still, now that I have allowed these vignettes to breath, I continue by making sense of the stories in two ways. Certainly, there are countless other ways to interpret possibilities, limitations, and concerns for literacy education in the stories I have shared here. I proceed by analyzing my vignettes in relation to vital textuality and improvisational emergence. These two interpretive categories work together as a provocation toward an improvisational view urban literacy pedagogy—especially in relation to how teachers might conceive of textuality.
Vital Textuality
I return to Boldt’s (in press) argument that teachers should work toward vitality in classrooms by following the rise and fall of energy. I extend this notion into how teachers conceive of and represent textuality in their teaching. Watkins and Ostenson (2015) wrote that, “while we know which factors researchers and policymakers suggest that teachers use to select texts, and we know which texts they are using, little research exists on how teachers actually make these important text decisions?” (p. 246). Whether or not the reader feels Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a text that should be included in a classroom, it is clear that teaching the game activated energy, both in Stephen’s class as well as other contexts over the next 15 years. Watkins and Ostenson (2015) wondered if teachers “use the suggested factors for selecting text?” or if “there other factors that influence their text selection decisions?” (p. 246). It may have been that I was influenced by the vital energies in the room, and this led me to a surprising encounter with what Boldt (2020) describes as polymodal attunement in my teaching.
Boldt (2020) relied on the work of relational psychoanalyst and infant researcher Daniel Stern (2010) to argue that attunement is “largely out of conscious awareness” (p. 7) and results in a “shared state of vitality” that emerges out of “verbal and non-verbal” experiences of bodies coming into relation with each other and the objects around them (p. 4). In other words, the unconscious and unspoken actions, feelings, and relationships around an event are often as or sometimes more important than what people have to say about the event. Seeking out and practicing polymodal attunement, for Boldt (2020), is one way to access the vital experience of “being taken up in, moving with, and contributing to an energized flow” (p. 3). The stories in this article suggest that the experience of playing the game in a classroom was about being taken up with a flow. Yes, the game and my intention to explore race and gender were a part of the teaching event, but the energy and materiality around bringing this text to class took on a life of its own.
Stephan sitting as close as he could to me as we played the game mattered. Vashayla’s laughter mattered. My principal sitting silently in the back of the classroom mattered. My White maleness mattered. Stephan’s Blackness mattered. Our relationships and roles mattered. The thoughts and feelings all of us were having around racial and gendered narratives in the weeks leading up to playing the game were likely as important to the textuality of the literacy event as the game itself. These things mattered and, though I tried to capture the energies of the events in the stories above, it is likely impossible to represent them in this article. Instead, the narratives here are an event in and of themselves. A teacher seeking out vital textuality, then, is open to both the kind of text they might choose to teach as well as how the group moves with the textuality that emerges from that choice. Such a view of textuality requires a willingness to improvise with and against the status quo. To let go of a desire to overly design the purpose of interacting with a text.
Emergent, Improvisational Textuality
Scholarship such as Boldt et al. (2015) and Leander and Boldt (2013) have paid attention to emergent literacy pedagogy. This work has conceptualized teaching that is not overly prescriptive or dismissive of difference. Leander and Boldt (2013) looked to Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to wonder how students become more engaged when allowed to work with what they described as the resources outside of school that is “the familiar, the known, the expected, and dependable” (p. 43). They argued that inviting students to play with combinations of these emergent resources allows thinking to “take flight in to something new” (p. 43). They admitted that their observations did “not constitute a pedagogy” but did see improvisation as “an opening” that led to the following question: Can the teacher make space for fluidity and indeterminacy as the nature of things? Can he or she recognize difference, surprise, and unfolding that follow along paths that are not rational or linear or obviously critical or political? (p. 43)
My decision to bring Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to my classes came about because the curriculum (i.e., texts such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Black Boy and discussions of racial and gendered narratives) came into relation with my recognition of the potential for emergent thinking in relation to our shared experience with a game. Indeed, I was open to the possibility that scrutinizing this game more seriously with my students might create what Leander and Boldt (2013) described as “an assemblage with the materials, time, space, experiences, movement, play, emotion, and desires” (p. 43). This process may have been one of polymodal attunement. Students and I were brought together in vital relation through the textuality that emerged from an unexpected literacy event. Surprising thinking and feeling around a video game emerged and kept emerging—both Stephen and I were still thinking about our work to name and rethink the stories we tell about racial identity 15 years later.
Part of the story above is, of course, the fact that teaching Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas almost got me in trouble. Once more I will remind the reader that I am a White man. I am not so sure a teacher of Color would have survived the same scrutiny I faced from my White principal and White department chair. Improvisational teaching is risky because it disrupts norms. Bodies and positionalities matter in relation to this riskiness. Regardless, I am convinced of the need for improvisational pedagogical disruptions.
My teaching in the stories above was improvisational as I followed the energies in my classroom, but it was disciplined improvisational practice because it was grounded in professional experience. Rush et al. (2013) argued that literacy educators should have a knowledge of texts that “is deep and wide, including not only those from the literary canon but also relevant young adult literature, multicultural texts, contemporary fiction and nonfiction, media and film, and other digital texts” (p. 212). I drew on my own understanding of textuality as I imagined bringing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas into my classrooms. Still, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas created a disruption because many colleagues that did not have the same background as me, as noted in the vignettes above, expressed concern about my use of the text. It was clear to me that my principal and other English teachers thought my use of the game was abnormal and, in some case, illegitimate. Recall DeVane and Squire’s (2008) contention earlier that critics of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas miss the literary merit in the text because they are, often without having played the game, compelled to disavow it. Perhaps my peers were worried that provoking students to interact with the text might affirm misogynistic or White supremacist ideology. Perhaps they were concerned that I was celebrating violence using the game. Their worries may have been, as my principal put it, that I was playing video games in class and this was not an appropriate activity in a high school classroom.
Recall Boldt’s (2020) claim that literacy education privileges a text-centric and overly rationale view of how teachers and students should view textuality in school. My work, as I return to it here, illustrates an event in which those forces were resisted in favor of surprising and vital classroom activity. Regardless, it was my intention to critically name these issues in class and work with students to more carefully analyze our encounters with oppressive reality. Rush et al. (2013) wrote that teachers “face pressure to select certain texts based on local norms and culture” (p. 212). This was a real tension in my work with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and, though I am convinced teachers need to disrupt the status quo with improvisational views of textuality, I am well aware of the risks that come with such an approach.
Toward an Improvisational Urban Literacy Pedagogy
Powell and Serriere (2013) described improvisational teaching and learning as the “unframing of curriculum” that allows “a diverse group of people to participate more fully” (p. 21) in the classroom. Curriculum around race and gender was unframed when I, to my surprise, brought Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas into my classroom. In previous work (Tanner, 2017), I have asked how literacy teachers imagine improvisational teaching and learning that facilitates the unexpected. My stories and subsequent interpretations of teaching Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas provide one way to respond to such a question. Teachers might affirm and engage texts and understanding of textuality that their students bring with them to the classroom to create improvisational learning experiences such as the one Stephan had with me so many years ago.
Returning to my experience through nonrepresentational narrative research illustrates the potential for teachers to follow energy in making improvisational decisions as they bring texts to students. My stories and analysis also suggest there is merit in expanding traditional notions of textuality. Teacher educators, administrators, and stakeholders in education might do better to support the expertise of teachers as they make unique or surprising decisions about the nature of text in their classrooms. Indeed, Croom (2020) worried that traditional understandings of textuality in school mean that, more often than not, “a large number of people are encountering the same mass distributed racial D/discourse (print or digital), even if each person is making sense of this racial D/discourse in unique ways” (p. 288). An improvisational view of textuality, in some ways, addresses this concern.
Is there danger in bringing nonstandardized text to the classroom? Certainly. Indeed, Kirkland (2014) claimed that “definitions of literacy are shaped by prevailing social and political trends of the time” (p. 394). Disrupting those trends is risky. But there is great potential in allowing teachers to make improvisational, localized choices that build off their experience in relation to the experiences of their students, too. To free teachers up to work toward polymodal attunement with their students in an effort to seek more vital spaces in school. Yes, my classes advanced our shared understandings of how racial and gendered narratives continue to unfold by reading Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas together, but, perhaps more importantly, the activity felt like a vital experience. That vitality might be why our work remains a powerful memory.
Recall the vignette I used to open this article. Stephan, nearly 15 years after our class was over, was still thinking about a text we read and analyzed in 9th grade English. Powell and Serriere (2013) argued that improvisational pedagogy or “an unframing of education is never complete. There is always more to uncover, more to expand and embrace” (p. 21). Fifteen years later, I must assume that Stephan—like me—was still uncovering, expanding, and embracing different views about race and gender. Leander and Boldt (2013) wrote of the “powerful potential” for “both research and pedagogy” to “build from its own major elements to emerge into improvisational flight” (p. 44). Activity in my classroom, for both Stephan and me, continued to energize us years later. In fact, this article is as surprising to me as the choice I made to bring the game to class so many years ago. I would not have thought of the notions of vital literacy or improvisational emergence when I was 23, teaching at Cardinal High School. Years later, in placing my experience in relationship to theory, more energy has been activated and I continue to move forward with the expectation of more movement. At the very least, I am honored to have shared a vital literacy experience through a strange encounter with text, textuality, and each other.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
