Minecraft Education Edition in foreign language education: Pre-service teachers’ reasons for acceptance and integration

Abstract

In this paper, I explored the reasons three pre-service teachers gave for why they accept and integrate Minecraft Education Edition into their growing practice. During a six-week online university course on technology in foreign language education, a group of twenty-one pre-service and in-service teachers created weekly Reflexive Digital Story (RDS) Journals to document their technology exploration along with lesson plans and projects that incorporated innovative technologies they wanted to integrate into their practice. Three of the pre-service teachers enrolled in this course became innovators and early adopters in comparison to their peers as they voluntarily integrated Minecraft Education Edition into their coursework. This allowed me to qualitatively analyze their coursework to identify the reasons they integrated the digital game into their developing practice. This work contributes to the field of digital game-based learning, technology acceptance and integration, and the study of teacher education by illuminating the factors that contribute to why pre-service teachers accept and use Virtual Worlds (VWs). I discovered the reasons these pre-service teachers gave for acceptance and use of VW technology embodied the recognition of a need for motivation and engagement in the classroom, beliefs about the social nature of culture and language, and perceptions of VWs as an opportunity to make the impossible possible.