In the first presentation, Gamifiying Generation Z’s language learning, the presenter explores alternative language learning approaches through a series of gamified French courses targeted toward reaching Generation Z learners. Building on arguments from research about motivation and engagement, play and game studies, and his current observations, this presentation showcases approaches that have proved to be powerful in developing stronger student agency. Within gamification models, strategies include rethinking courses with story-based and leveling-up systems aimed at changing student’s relationship to grades. The presenter scrutinizes the implementation of such strategies to shift from anxiety-propelled traditional assessment systems towards grading-for-growth and un-grading approaches in the language classroom. Inspired by storytelling and video games strategies to engage and define progress, through the lens of the large role-playing game culture, the presenter discuss its potential affordances and limitations.

The next presentation, Adapting to Generation Z: a Blended Connectivism Pedagogy Framework, reports on a study of Generation Z students’ views on learning world languages and suggests a pedagogical framework anchored in a connectivism learning theory framework, which views learning in the digital age as the connection of ideas, theory, and knowledge from various sources and through a combination of traditional and more alternative practices. Using a Content Analysis methodology (Krippendorff 2018), the results support previous findings that Generation Z students need to find value in their educational experiences (Mohr & Mohr 2017), prefer hands-on learning opportunities (Seemiller & Grace 2017), authentic storytelling (Schwieger & Ladwig 2018), online videos (Szymkowiak et al. 2021), learning phone applications/online platforms (Poláková & Klímová 2021), learning gamification (Saxena & Mishra 2021), etc. Their responses also highlight the primacy of developing their listening and speaking skills over reading and writing, the value of learning with social media and artificial intelligence tools and learning how to use them, and, quite paradoxically, the importance of handwriting to learn and of other more traditional approaches. Implications discuss how empowering students in the selection of materials and content, as well as guiding students through meaningful technology use and how to foster social connections in tandem with more traditional teaching approaches could be one of the most efficient ways to adapt our teaching to Generation Z students.

The final panelist examines the post-pandemic rise in student disengagement in relation to the broader social trend known as “quiet quitting” (which has been linked to Gen Z, fairly or unfairly, for the last several years). Quiet quitting is itself a phenomenon requiring fuller contextualization as it is, the presenter will argue, a response to economic and cultural conditions that have been developing for years. More specifically, quiet quitting can only be understood against the backdrop of changes occurring in the post-Fordist knowledge economy, including a breakdown in the compromise that followed the “artistic critique” of the older industrial production model that occurred in the 1960s. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello explain in The New Spirit of Capitalism, this “artistic critique” took aim at the alienating and soul-deadening bureaucratic work that plagued the college-educated professional class of the mid-twentieth century; what emerged in the wake of this critique were more challenging forms of work requiring workers’ creative and emotional capacities. Under this new regime, one’s job could become the primary vehicle for self-discovery and eventual self-actualization. Quiet quitting constitutes a (perhaps inchoate) rejection of these hyper-exploitative conditions, and any attempt to respond to quiet quitting in the college classroom should account for these antagonistic elements. What would it look like to treat student quiet quitting not as an obstacle to overcome but as a starting point for a new pedagogical approach? How would our classes need to change if we understood student disengagement as an early attempt at quietly quitting and what might be involved in our helping them to think through this strategy?