Building Worlds and Literacy Through Minecraft

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While I do not have my own Learning Commons, I have been been fortunate to TTOC in a few. Each space has similar and unique ways of fostering a reading culture. New book displays are placed in direct view of the entrance. Posters of teachers reading a favourite book adorn the shelves and the school hallways. Book recommendation boxes sit on all the circulation desks. Teacher-librarians go to classrooms or invite classes to the Learning Commons for book talks. If a student requests a book, then Teacher-Librarians will buy the book immediately, give it to the student and then barcode it later. All of these examples contribute to a reading culture within the school.

But what if there was another way to reach students who may not like traditional reading, but love gaming? That’s where Minecraft comes in.

Minecraft & Literacy

In Will Richardson’s Why School? he discusses how Minecraft  can promote learning. As I started my inquiry into cross-curricular coding, Minecraft kept coming up in my research, so I decided to look into how Minecraft could foster reading.

I found a few interesting articles on the connection between literacy and Minecraft. In Danica Davidson’s article “How Minecraft can foster Reading,” she discusses how students who don’t like reading, but adore gaming, love exploring the Minecraft novels, comics, online resources and even resource books. Students are willing to read if they are interested in the topic. If a student loves Minecraft, they will want to learn everything they can about the game. In “Minecraft in the Classroom Teaches Reading and More,”  Jacqui Murray argues that Minecraft promotes reading in the classroom by allowing students to create their own online worlds and then they are motivated to research all about the world they are creating. Interest in the topic motivates literacy. If students are reading more, then it really shouldn’t matter if the topic is Minecraft.

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I would love to see my district Learning Commons branch into Minecraft books. Students might be playing the game at home and would love to read more. I have seen students (usually boys) come into the the Learning Commons and struggle to find something to read. It never occurred to me that having reading material linked to gaming might benefit reading literacy, but now it seems like a novel approach to literacy.

Works Cited