The Mining of Craft: An exploration of Minecraft as a Community of Inquiry

Reading and Writing in any domain, whether it is law, rap songs, academic essays, superhero comics, or whatever, are not just ways of decoding print, they are also caught up with ways of doing things, thinking about things, valuing things, and interacting with other people – that is, they are caught up with different sorts of social practices. (Gee 2007, p. 18)

Reading and Writing, for James Gee, is how we engage with any knowledge community; what he calls a semiotic domain (2007). Our level of literacy in a given domain amounts to how well we can read (understand) and write (convey) the knowledge that the domain values. Education is all about teaching the student how to read and write. However, we read and write with much more than just pens and paper. Our literacy covers how we engage and interact within our domain of knowledge.

In the following paper I will explore these ideas of reading and writing within the domain of Minecraft. I will use the educational theory of John Dewey to show how the community of Minecraft creates its own knowledge community, and how its members learn to read and write.