In the district I worked for, I was asked by the superintendent’s office to make a games-based asset for 6th grade science classrooms to use as an introductory module to the rain cycle. The specifications were that it should be interactive, utilize the SmartBoard as the delivery method, possibly themed after Jeopardy, and should allow students to have real-time feedback in terms of a win/loss state; if they answer a question correctly, they ‘win’ and continue to the next question, and if they don’t, they ‘lose’ and another student comes up and starts the game over. I made this asset, it was signed off on, and it was released district-wide. What was not communicated to me was that this asset would be used as an assessment tool for students’ progress leading up to Texas’ standardized test, STAAR. There are a few considerations that must be made when examining this situation: First, why is a game being used to introduce material but also assess students on what they’ve learned when there has been no formal instruction on the subject in question? Second, why is a games-based pedagogical model being used to assess student success regarding a standardized test that is not games-based? Third, which students in these classrooms had the technological proficiencies to successfully complete these games, or to possibly game the game by guessing the answers correctly based on experience they’ve had with similar games on, say, the Wii? When I raised some of these questions with the superintendent’s office, they said that “[This district] prides itself on being a place where all students are active learners and where technology aids all classrooms and teachers in achieving that goal.” The district’s vague, patronizing boilerplate only works to highlight the complete disconnect between teachers operating in the classroom and administration who are relentless in pushing technologization within the classroom, regardless of who inhabits that space.

## In the End, Does it Even Matter?

The examples above are granular examples of the wider problematic implementation of technology in classrooms and a push for games-based pedagogy that I’ve experienced. These systems privilege certain learners over others both through how the district forces pedagogical styles on teachers and by forcing teachers to use technology that may be against the teachers’ better judgements I hope this work will start a conversation about how we, as educators, can start thinking through granular approaches to classroom technologization that privilege all of our learners over totalizing approaches that only favor some learners. Sometimes that means not using technology, or pushing back on using technology that does not align with the pedagogical practices that we, as classroom instructors, know will better suit the learners we are instructing. What I am calling for is a critical reexamination of how, why, and where technology and games- based learning is implemented in classroom settings and how it erases certain learners. I am calling for future theoretical and practical work that decenters white, normative, upper-middle class bodies as the assumed-standard bodies in classrooms, and for scholarship that decenters white, normative, upper-middle class scholars as preeminent in the field of games-based pedagogy. Instead, future work should approach pedagogy, technology, and games-based learning from an intersectional paradigm in which teachers who are in the classroom every day with their students of varying socioeconomic status and of varying technological proficiencies