Bio

Dr. Jennifer Jenson is Director of the Institute for Research on Digital Learning (http://irdl.info.yorku.ca/) and Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University, Canada. Dr. Jenson is an internationally recognized scholar on digital games and gender, and on technology and education. She has published on digital games and education, technology and pedagogy, gender, technologies and video games, online learning, and technology policy and policy practices in K-12 schooling. Dr. Jenson is currently the Principal Investigator of a large, international partnership grant, “Re-Figuring Innovation in Games” (http://www.refig.ca), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. That $2.5 million (Canadian) funded grant includes professors and students in the UK, Canada, and the U.S., all working toward promoting equity and diversity in the cultures and industries surrounding video games. 

Project

The animated TV series South Park is now, remarkably, in its 21st season and focuses on the everyday, every night’ lives of a group of kids growing up in a small Colorado town. The focus of this project is on examining the many ways in which the series portrays, satirizes, and makes light of schools, teachers, students, parents and pedagogical approaches. The end goal is to design a hybrid (both online and face-to-face) undergraduate course that examines those episodes that specifically focused on teaching and learning, bringing those into conversation with current and past pedagogical and learning focused theories in order to examine the ways in which current and past educational practices reproduce and reinforce structural inequities.