Interview with Jason Rosenblum, Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin on Educational Technology, Games-Based Learning, and Design Justice

About Jason Rosenblum, Ph.D.: Jason Rosenblum is Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Learning Technologies program in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas (UT) at Austin, where he is also Coordinator of the Learning, Equity, Action, and Design (LEAD) graduate certificate program. He is also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Artificial Intelligence in Education, a new open-access journal by Emerald Publishing. Dr. Rosenblum’s research and praxis focuses on equity in the innovation and application of educational technologies, with an emphasis on humanizing pedagogies, design justice, game-based learning and artificial intelligence.

Dr. Rosenblum’s publications on educational technology, games-based learning, and design justice have appeared in journals including Equity and Excellence in Education and in collected volumes like Games-Based Learning Across the Disciplines and Mobile Media Learning. Dr. Rosenblum’s work on the LEAD graduate certificate was recently honored with an Actions that Promote Community Transformation (ACT) grant from UT. In addition to his roles at UT, Dr. Rosenblum worked as Visiting Professor at Universidad Panamericana (Panamerican University) in 2023.

Prior to his time at UT, Dr. Rosenblum was Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the New York Institute of Technology, where he also served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor. He was also Assistant Professor of Visual Studies and Assistant Professor of Digital Media at St. Edward’s University. Dr. Rosenblum received his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Learning Technologies from the University of Texas at Austin, his M.S. in Computer Education & Cognitive Systems (now the Learning Technologies Master’s program) from the University of North Texas, and his B.S. in Microbiology from Texas A&M University.

Interview Questions

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] May we begin with an overview of your academic and professional background? How did you become interested in instructional technology, design, and games-based approaches to education and their potential for advancing educational equity?

[Dr. Jason Rosenblum] The story behind that begins with my early adoption and use of instructional technologies and other technologies that could be used within instructional settings. I wanted to redesign the instructional experience and help people learn and interact. As I began digging into the various affordances of technologies in the early 2000s, I discovered and began using not only traditional instructional technologies but also more innovative approaches like games-based learning (GBL).

One of the things that I find the most compelling about GBL strategies is that they are an amalgamation of what folks would normally describe as “active learning” strategies and “student-centered” learning approaches. We can design games using these particular strategies, which center what students are learning and how they are learning. In doing so, either through a digital delivery mechanism or through an analog delivery mechanism, we can create novel, interactive educational spaces, which, when applied thoughtfully, can result in a very engaged learning process.

I call it a learning process because really, what learning games are trying to do is help lead the student through a process of discovery, through a process of engagement, through a process of working, either within themselves or with others, to construct and co-construct knowledge. Games do this in novel ways that ask students to solve problems. The longer I started digging into this process, the more I realized that the goal was to try to advance ideas of social justice.

This became especially clear to me through two games-based learning projects I undertook in collaboration with colleagues of mine [discussed further in question three below]. The first revolved around the idea of building cultural awareness around an underrepresented group of people within what, at the time, was an underexplored area within East Austin. The second explored the complexities of the Syrian Civil War. In these projects, we integrated student-centered learning and constructivist learning approaches and designed tools for developing cultural awareness on both a local and global scale.

Having done this work, I think it is incumbent on me as a scholar and as an educator to ask the question, “Who is actually benefiting from these applications? Who benefits from these tools?” As I move through different instructional spaces, and certainly through my work here at UT, questions around issues of justice-based and equity-focused approaches to learning are front and center. Once we start asking the question about who benefits, we have to take a look at the extremely long history of research on games-based learning that has been done by many wonderful, inclusive scholars and ask, “Where is the potential for this kind of work to have the most impact?”

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] Would you elaborate on how you define equity in your research and practice? In particular, how does your focus on technology and design and your investment in design justice offer a unique vantage point for understanding and addressing issues of equity in education?

[Dr. Jason Rosenblum] Many people today are publishing about inclusive approaches to pedagogy and innovation. Still, I have to ask if we are doing enough. Have we said all that needs to be said about building inclusive learning spaces, and, more than that, about building opportunities that center the needs of particular groups of people? I think about equity and justice in technology by asking, when we integrate technologies, where are we integrating them? Whom are we integrating them for? By what means are we making decisions about how we integrate them and whom are we including in that decision-making?

Many of these disparities reared their heads even more acutely during the COVID-19 pandemic, often around discussions of the “homework gap.” Access to technology serves as a baseline definition of equity within most common discourse. When people talk about digital equity, one of the most common things they talk about is access to x, y, or z technologies: access to infrastructure, access to computers, access to iPads. But the reason the homework gap exists is not just because of access to devices. It is about what students are doing with the devices and to what extent the instructor knows how to best take advantage of these technologies and approaches to help the people that are experiencing a homework gap the most.

We have to adopt a humanizing way of looking at our pedagogy and instruction using these technological systems to help close these gaps. Technology systems really do not do things in and of themselves. They are only as useful as the pedagogy that drives them. If we are trying to center pedagogy in ways that address homework gaps and other concerns of marginalized or underrepresented groups, we have to ask ourselves, “How can we adapt the uses of technology around problems of practice that are experienced by these groups of people?”

To me, that is a really interesting question, because we are not just building knowledge amongst people that may have more privileged backgrounds. Now we are talking about taking that one step further and asking how we can center the folks that might benefit the most from these technologies and let their needs and desires inform how we use technologies and how we design our classroom environments and our pedagogical approaches.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] Your work on games-based education ranges from educational tabletop board games, as in “Gameful Learning and the Syrian Conflict: Developing Global Learning Competencies in a Complex Conflict,” to the mobile, urban scavenger hunt discussed in “Introducing a Neighborhood: Mobile as a Springboard for Exploration.” Drawing from these pieces, could you discuss some of the unique affordances of games as an approach to education, and, more specifically, the opportunities they offer for enriching students’ cultural understanding on both local and global scales?

[Dr. Jason Rosenblum] “Introducing a Neighborhood” was a collaborative project with Kim Garza, who is a graphic design scholar. It revolved around bringing attention to the cultural history of East Austin. The goal was to try to put people in a situation where they could develop certain cultural lenses through which they could appropriately look at a given space, talk to people, interact, and learn more about the culture. Raising awareness around a community that was subject to gentrification and marginalization in Austin was a moving instructional experience for folks.

That project inspired me to ask, “How else can we do this? What other kinds of affordances can games give us to decenter certain dominant perspectives and to recenter the perspectives of people who would not ordinarily have a voice in this particular situation?” That is how the Syrian simulation was born. It was a collaboration between experts in history, Middle Eastern studies, and geopolitics. The goal was to build a novel learning space through which people could explore aspects of the politics and cultures that are embedded within what we know to be the conflict in Syria.

For those of your readers who may be unfamiliar, the Syrian simulation was a live tabletop roleplaying game that asked teams of people to roleplay as the various organizations and actors in the conflict in Syria. We had a table that played as Bashar al-Assad. We had tables that played various rebel groups in Syria. We had a table that played the Syrian population, while others played Russia, China, and Hezbollah. We tried to position people such that they could see through the eyes of folks who were impacted by the conflict within this space in various ways. It was an in-depth dive into both the “what, why, when, and where” of what was happening and the cultural reasons behind the conflict. People roleplayed as different groups who were involved in the conflict. This was a social justice exercise, where we were attempting to build global competencies: the ability to see the world through different lenses.

In dealing with local issues, like my project on Austin with Dr. Garza, I had to wrestle with issues of accessibility and depth. There were a lot of questions asked about where we were going to take people on this walking tour of the East Cesar Chavez area, which is now completely transformed, to the point that the original culture has been pushed out. A lot of these businesses no longer exist. A question that comes up in this game — as with games created around other spaces like Chris Holden’s Mentira, which is an exploratory game centered on Albuquerque, New Mexico — is how to encourage students and others to engage with their local communities and different learning goals through designing a series of interactions. How do we design a discovery-based, mobile, augmented reality experience within a local environment in such a way that we can logistically manage that entire process, ensure equitable access for everybody within the project, and create enough depth for students?

In contrast, the hardest thing about the Syria simulation was that it was not local. We did not have access to local people or local knowledge. One of the people on our team had been to Syria, but, with respect to the conflict, it was difficult to know exactly what was happening unless you really dug into the research — not only the news but the political analysis and the historical perspective. That is why we needed a team of people to understand the histories and perspectives of the different groups that were collaborating and in conflict. We were trying to simulate extremely complex geopolitical dynamics between different political and cultural groups.

All those variables factor into creating not only the space for play in the game but also the space for cultural exploration. We tried to stay true to the conflict historically and the cultural backgrounds of all the people involved, which included the table playing as Bashar al-Assad. Everybody had different kinds of actions that they could take, but critically, we asked people to play from the perspective of that particular group. The table that played as al-Assad had to speak as al-Assad in a way that was true to that particular character. The point of the simulation was to drop players into this really complex space, give them a series of problems organized by round, and have them attempt to work out a solution. “Winning” meant keeping casualties down, keeping the number of refugees down, and having approval of the other actors involved and the Syrian population.

If all that sounds impossible, that was by design. It was designed to be extraordinarily difficult for any group of players. This game did not pit one group against another group — we talked about winning in terms of the entire group of students. Can the entire group of people come to a win? The answer, with one exception, was no. We had one set of students who managed to play true to their characters and we achieved a win, just barely, on the very last workshop of the delivery of the simulation. But, for most part, the tendency was for things to basically crash and burn. That was part of the rhetoric behind our simulation. We have constructed an experience that tries to stay as true to the cultural narrative as we possibly could, and that is what makes “winning” so challenging.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] You were also International Professor at Universidad Panamericana Aguascalientes in Mexico, where you worked on designing a “justice-based” game. Would you tell us about this game design project, the idea of a “justice-based” game, and how this connects to your interest in design justice?

[Dr. Jason Rosenblum] I was invited to come to Universidad Panamericana, or Panamerican University (UP) in Aguascalientes, Mexico to teach a class, knowing I had a background in games-based learning and justice-based game design. I also coordinate the Learning, Equity, Action, and Design (LEAD) stackable graduate certificate here at UT [discussed further in subsequent questions]. When they asked me what I wanted to do, I decided I essentially wanted to take the LEAD stackable certificate on the road.

I wanted to teach a class in which people got to explore technology, ways to integrate technology, and ways to design learning through the application of innovative, games-based strategies connected with real-world projects that were meaningful to people in the local area. I was going to teach a group of people who were undergraduate teacher candidates. This meant I needed to teach the course at an undergraduate level, not a graduate level.

I was there with my teaching assistant and a research assistant, and we wanted to research how teachers perceived the integration of design and games-based learning toward community service. We had two service projects that developed over our time there. First, I asked ahead of time to partner with a group at UP whose focus was working with local elementary and middle schools within the community. That group said, “I would really love for the teachers to work on something where they could actually apply their prior knowledge to benefit a real group of people.” We collaborated with a school maybe 45 minutes away from Aguascalientes. It was a rural school without internet access. The school itself was actually closed for this particular engagement, so we had to meet outside of school.

This was a school facing a number of educational obstacles. The students do not always go to school. They were lacking things that I certainly took for granted growing up: not only the physical resources and the physical infrastructure, but also relational support and family support. The problem of practice we were dealing with was not just that a lot of these children came from abusive and underserved backgrounds. The problem was that they did not really see themselves as being people who would benefit from school.

This returned us to the question I introduced in my discussion of how I understand equity. How can we, as a group of educators, design a learning experience that is informed by games-based learning and by humanizing approaches to pedagogy? By “humanizing” I mean that we are centering the voices and identities of the people who are supposed to benefit. This is connected to design justice in a very specific way. Design justice was developed by Sasha Costanza-Chock from Northeastern University in her fantastic book [Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need]. I sought to apply this idea to our efforts to better serve students at this school.

If we are adopting design justice pedagogy, we want to try to incorporate the perspectives of those people who might benefit from the design within the design process. This is a commitment, and it is a hard commitment. Design is not always an open or collaborative process. There is a good deal of design work where designers attempt to apply their insights to helping educators design their own curriculums, but I wanted to position both the educators and the students that I worked with as designers. They are the ones who are the closest to the problems of practice on the ground.

That is what I did in my collaboration with the school we worked with near Aguascalientes. I had a basic plan, and then I changed it. I pivoted because the needs of the students were such that we could not count on the internet, and we had a limited time for engagement. I could not count on teacher support there because the teachers of the local school were out of session. We assembled a group of teachers and decided to roll with it.

The teachers created digital comics and a series of interactive exercises that got students to ask questions about their own identities. The goal was to try to help them discover their voices. In the process, the teachers also had a chance to discover their own voices. It had a dual purpose: on the one hand, we have the actual benefit to the children at this school, but through the process my goal was to try to help the educators involved see the learning space and the possibilities of games-based learning differently.

The second community project we worked on is still in progress. I told my partners at UP that I would love to be able to take advantage of what technologies like augmented reality can offer, and asked if it would be possible to bring students from the local community to the university’s campus to have this experience. They told me that they have an event that they do every December where they bring about 300 children and their families from five local schools to the university.

The teachers built out a functional prototype of my design, which had the children go through a series of augmented reality stations placed around the school, threaded together using a narrative that asks the students to explore the university’s different offerings: the space where they teach people how to build cars; the wonderful, beautiful professional kitchen where people learn how to become chefs; and the engineering and robotics lab. We wanted to use this set of augmented reality experiences to help these children visualize themselves as students at the university. Of course, it is a Christmas event and, of course, they are there to have fun with their families, so they are already engaged. We wanted to add this level of interactivity in ways that get them to question who they are and who they can be in the university space.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] At The University of Texas, you are Coordinator of the Learning, Equity, Action, and Design (LEAD) graduate certificate program. Would you tell us about this unique program and discuss some of your main objectives as its Coordinator?

[Dr. Jason Rosenblum] I was asked to design the LEAD certificate program several years ago. At that time, I wanted us, as a Learning Technologies program situated within the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, to take a very critical view of technology. By critical view, I do not just mean dissecting what the technology can and cannot do, although that is a part of it.

I mean examining in what ways and for whom technology is beneficial. For whom do we usually create technologies? I wanted us to adopt different kinds of strategies rooted in humanizing and justice-oriented perspectives on design to rethink how we ask questions about how technology is integrated.

LEAD stands for Learning, Equity, Action, and Design. Equity, in part, means taking humanizing approaches to education and embedding or centering those in instruction. The action piece has to do with how we can build things that are not only useful, but which are expressly designed to meet the needs of marginalized groups. The design piece is rooted in these ideas of design justice we have discussed [in the previous question] and a critical orientation toward whom we include in the design process and how we personalize instruction. Those are the tenets on which the LEAD certificate is built.

The certificate itself consists of two pairs of sister courses. The first pair is Humanizing Pedagogy & Technology Integration and Humanizing Pedagogy & Online Teaching Models for K-12 Education. The Technology Integration class focuses on the design of humanizing approaches to face-to-face instruction. The Online Teaching Models class focuses on the equivalent but through hybrid, synchronous, and asynchronous approaches to online learning. Students learn about the research on online teaching and learning and perspectives that would help them to redesign or rethink how online spaces can be used.

The other two classes are the justice-based classes: Technology Design for Digital Justice and Technology Innovation for Digital Justice. Those are also sister classes. Part of what characterizes digital design justice as an approach is its connection to community. The question is how we as educators, within classroom settings or outside of them, can create spaces that foster community involvement, whether through mentorship, involving students in design, or working in collaboration with communities to address their needs.

The Technology Innovation class is focused on how we build using innovative approaches. We discuss augmented reality, 360° Video, and critical perspectives on AI in education. We also introduce games-based learning, though this is an online class so we cannot do face-to-face roleplaying and have to use other tools to craft games-based experiences. It is intended as a robust introduction to what kinds of technology innovations exist and how we can apply them in ways that support justice-based outcomes. I am always redesigning the curriculum to meet the needs of the students.

The program is 100 percent online, so my classes generally are asynchronous. There are no formal meetings except for things like help sessions. We have had one full cohort complete the program so far. The program is designed to be something that, even if you are not seeking a degree at UT, you can still complete as a non-degree seeking student. We might be looking at other options such that people will not necessarily have to enroll as a graduate student at UT in the future. That is something we are taking a close look at to increase the accessibility of the program.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] One of your most recent publications is “Indigenous Zoom: Relational Approaches to Virtual Learning,” coauthored with Michelle M. Jacob, where you reflect on the significance of Yakama Indigenous teachings to constructing relational and equitable virtual learning communities. Would you discuss the inspiration for this publication and some of the key lessons for virtual learning it distills from Yakama pedagogies?

[Dr. Jason Rosenblum] This publication is written again within the scope of my work trying to build the LEAD stackable certificate. It revolves around questions of how we can create justice-based outcomes through justice-focused designs and approach questions about inclusion and equity in ways that inform student-focused practices within online spaces. My coauthor for the paper is Michelle Jacob from the University of Oregon. I first met Dr. Jacob in an online webinar that she gave in the middle of the pandemic. Dr. Jacob is an Indigenous scholar, and she has been publishing on Indigenous work for a very long time.

I saw something special in that webinar. I was not just listening to her talk; I was pulled into her talk. In fact, it was probably one of the most engaging talks I had ever been a part of, because it was not just a talk. I had to ask, “What’s going on here? Why is it that, with the same technology systems we would normally use during emergency remote teaching situations, she was able to create this engaging space?” There is, of course, a large amount of literature on emergency remote teaching and online learning, but what I really wanted to explore after Dr. Jacob’s talk was how we can help to humanize these particular spaces.

What engaged me so much was the fact that the emphasis was not just on the content that was being communicated or the interactive question and answer. It was Dr. Jacob’s application of years of scholarship on Indigenous pedagogies to create a space that was welcoming and which emphasized relationality. She pulled in and connected aspects of her culture to this particular space, and invited people to engage with that background, those strategies, those ways of knowing, those ways of communicating, those ways of relating. It informed everything about how that webinar was structured, and its impact on participants.

I spoke to Dr. Jacob and told her that I would really love to explore this further, and we started collaborating. Initially I was looking at questions about Zoom as a technology, which led to even more important questions about relationality. How can we, through our pedagogy, create spaces that are not only inviting but which also center the needs and desires of particular groups, in this case Indigenous groups? That means bringing in aspects of our cultures and actively asking people to bring in aspects of their own cultures within the school setting. It has to do with relationships between home and school, relationships between work and school, and ways of knowing within our instructional spaces.

In the article, we discussed the concept of relationality and its implications for equity and inclusion in education. We also wrote about the idea of using digital relationality to humanize online spaces. We can use Zoom in such a way that we do not just have one person talking all the time and then other students responding. We can center students as actors. We can empower them to do things, and we can ask them to bring in elements of their cultures that inform their perspectives on whatever the topic is that we are trying to teach them. That was the impetus behind the work. There are opportunities to learn from these strategies as we work with Indigenous folks and people from other marginalized groups.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] Based on your research and experience, do you have advice you would give to educators, scholars, administrators, or anyone else seeking to advance education equity in their own work?

[Dr. Jason Rosenblum] I would suggest we begin to move the discourse related to equity past notions of access to things: access to teachers, access to technology, access to infrastructure. Obviously, we need every single bit of that. It is the basis of everything else. But I would strongly suggest that we move past thinking about equity in these terms and start thinking about equity in terms of how to design instruction more broadly and the equitability of student backgrounds and contexts.

We need an encompassing, systemic equity in order to create not only equitable access to learning devices but also equitable access to the teaching and the instructional strategies needed to make the most of these technologies in our classrooms. That means asking how to design and apply technology systems in ways that can center the needs of the people that might stand to benefit from them, and using that as the basis for designing everything.

Thank you, Dr. Rosenblum, for sharing your insight on games-based learning, design justice, the Learning, Equity, Action, and Design graduate certificate at UT, and more!

About the Author: Ben Clancy (they/them) is an academic and creative living in Chicago, IL. As an interviewer, Ben has had the honor of speaking with leading and emerging voices in the fields of communication, education, and beyond. They are a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at UNC Chapel Hill, a former Research Fellow for the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, and an alum of the Vermont Studio Center poetry residency. Ben holds an M.A. in Communication Studies from Texas State University, and a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Trinity University.