Världen slutar med dig

Abstract

The World Ends With You: Reading as Participation The last decades of research in the education field have shifted focus from the cognitive activities of autonomous individuals to participants’ activities in situated learning practices. Yet, emphasis in the Bologna Process and in the on-going reforms of swedish education is on the learning subject as a free, rational consumer of neatly defined competencies that the labour market requires. The article argues that a stronger participants’ perspective could help resist a neoliberal trend in education. Instead of thinking of participation as something that individuals do, the notion could be built upon radical constructivist systems theory. Learning and participation should be put in terms of construction and reconstruction of identity within evolving social systems. With the example of a piece of recent ergodic literature, the Nintendo DS game The World Ends With You, it is demonstrated how the common educational activity of reading can be described as a process of simultaneous construction of reader identity and meaning within a specific practice. The article argues that such a perspective counters the core notions in the neoliberal understanding of education, notably the autonomous individual and learning as an active acquisition of neatly defined knowledge that is »out there«. A new participants’ perspective could also have immediate consequences for the choice of method and theme in every day practice in education.

Keywords

• radical constructivism
• ergodic literature
• game studies
• reading
• neoliberal education