Samuel McCready
Contract Instructor
| Degrees: | B.A. History (Carleton), M.A. History (Carleton), Ph.D. Communication & Culture (York) |
| Email: | samuelmccready@cunet.carleton.ca |
Academic Interests:
Education; Game studies; Historical theory/representation(s); Historiography; Media/critical literacy; Historical thinking and pedagogy; Digital history.
Research Description:
My dissertation/current research is located in game studies, game-based learning, productive pedagogies, and history education. In addition, I have a background in 19th century British history, critical historiography, and historical theory.
My current research explores digital games and their potential uses in education. Specifically, I am pursuing qualitative research regarding how games provide their players with an opportunity to ask and address critical questions that can help to develop and advance their critical thinking and literacy skills. I also remain interested in how digital games offer access to the past via interactive play and the implications of this for the making and consuming of history by a broader public.
As part of my PhD field work, I ran two participant research studies (Past stories and future worlds: History and popular imagination in Fallout 4, York University; Re-thinking history teaching: historical making and learning in digital culture, Carleton/York University) that involved playing and producing historical games. This research argued that playing and making historical games offers learners an opportunity to engage critically with history as a subject, and can pose questions related to the epistemological, interpretative, and ideological components of historical scholarship.
Select Publications:
McCready, S. (2021) Playing and Making History: How Game Design and Gameplay Afford Opportunities for a Critical Engagement with the Past. PhD Dissertation.
https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/39154
McCready, S. (2019). Playing the Past and Alternative Futures: Counterfactual History in Fallout 4. Loading… https://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/235