Gaming Literacy and Its Potential for Teaching Social and Emotional Learning to Adolescent Children

As interactive multimodal texts, video games can teach SEL because of their unique affordances. This chapter investigates how playing video games can teach literacy to adolescent children while also cultivating their opportunities to develop SEL skills. SEL is defined, as is the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) SEL Framework, a set of five competencies that also considers the nested environments that children inhabit. Next, emerging research on adolescent neuroplasticity when video games are used as an SEL intervention is reviewed. How the consumption of interactive media, like video games, affects well-being is explored, followed by the ways in which video games teach literacy through a variety of modalities. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how games and games genre map and align to CASEL's SEL framework.