### The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions: On Technology, Games-Based Learning, and Erasure

My mother has taught third graders for 20 years in an “extreme poverty conditions” low-income school in Texas that is seated within a wealthier-than-average school district. Her experiences as a teacher, team leader, and mentor for new teachers in her school have left her and those around her with the distinct feeling that their intuition and embodied experiences are not valued. Instead, a constant, district-wide push towards technologization and game-based pedagogy within classrooms have left my mother and her peers rudderless. She got me a job working in technology support for her school while I completed my undergraduate degree. I spent over 3 years supporting the technology that, below, I argue we should be more thoughtful about before using. I had a direct hand in the unthoughtful creation and implementation of that technology. I still feel deeply responsible for the problems it has caused. It is time that we have a frank discussion about the role of technology in the classroom and the push to turn pedagogy into a model that emulates and values gamic learning models over any other. Education scholars who have turned to videogames to attempt to solve all the problems of modern education predicate their work on an assumed heterosexual, white, male, able-bodied, middle-to-upper-middle-class student who is actively engaged in their own learning and has the support infrastructure in place to eliminate precarity and uncertainty from developmental learning. How can I make such an audacious claim? By virtue of what material my mother’s continuing education requirements have her reading still to this day, and what professional development I sat through that espoused the same uncritical values with the same handful of citations, repeated ad nauseum. I attended numerous professional development meetings each year regarding strategies of increased technologization in the classroom, and why it’s critical to student engagement and success that those technologies be actively used by all teachers. My mother’s professional development experiences are similar: She has repeatedly heard that rote learning (worksheets, flash drills, etc) is oppressive to students and, instead, games-based learning is now the preferred pedagogical approach to teaching in this district, according to “specialists”. The scholars that our district uses to base their claims on are scholars like Jane McGonigal, Constance Steinkuehler, James Gee, Greg Toppo, Kurt Squire, Guzman and Nussbaum, Charles Kilfoye, and Lee Sheldon. Each part of each scholars’ name links to at least one piece they’ve written about technology [games-based or otherwise] in classrooms, and does little to critically engage with who is benefited by these technologies and game-based pedagogies and who is erased. For instance, a common theme emerging from McGonigal, Gee, and Steinkuehler is that lived, embodied experiences are not enough to learn by (see: McGonigal's Reality is Broken for a truly audacious reading of ‘lived experiences’). Instead, they argue, videogames, game-based learning, and technologized learning are the only valid ways of learning due to an increasingly interconnected and technologized global economy. Lee Skallerup Bessette, in “It’s Time to Play: Games, Gamification, and Active Learning,” brings up important questions of play in the learning process. She examines how and why technology is on the uptick in university classrooms and how the drive of technologizing classrooms is untenable for adjunct faculty that often teach across multiple universities and are