The Oregon Trail is a Loop: Video Games and the Rebuilding of Racist Structures in Education

Authors

Sam Pietsch, The University of Texas at DallasFollow

Abstract

In the latter half of the 20^th century, American public education underwent sweeping changes that not only remade oppressive structures but reconfigured the underlying ideologies that served as the foundation for systemic oppression since this country’s inception. Conceptions of race, racial subjectivity, and neoliberal capitalism as it relates to education mutated over this period, looping the progressive trail blazed by the Civil Rights movement back onto itself. The story of the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) serves as a coherent narrative that tracks how institutional reconfiguration of race (demonstrated through the games they authored) entwined with the privatization of education (a process MECC underwent as it transitioned from public agency to private company) to produce the era we find ourselves in. That is, an era where market solutions to inequality trap education in a recursive loop and present the only means of escape as moving backwards. Coming to understand how these foundational concepts evolved is key to pushing forward once again.

Recommended Citation

Pietsch, Sam (2022) "The Oregon Trail is a Loop: Video Games and the Rebuilding of Racist Structures in Education," Race and Pedagogy Journal: Teaching and Learning for Justice: Vol. 5: No. 3, Article 1.
Available at: https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/rpj/vol5/iss3/1