Game-Based Learning and the Challenges of School Reform

The previous three chapters—Chaps. 4, 5, and 6—illustrated how authentic game-based learning can be enacted in the classroom, to good effect, in humanities as well as the sciences. In this chapter, I take up the challenges entailed in making such learning normative and customary in formal education: to make the potential actual. To achieve actuality, it will be necessary to understand why the practice of schooling resists change and how economic, social, and political forces and discourses that envelop schooling construct a nexus of interwoven customs and expectations that have the tendency to maintain the status quo.