Deborah Fields
Biography
Deborah A. Fields is a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. Prior to attending UCLA, she obtained a Master’s in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Over the years, she has participated in a number of educational studies including informal science education, culturally relevant pedagogy in statistics, learning by design, and ethnographies of Los Angeles schools and professional development. Influenced by her gaming experiences, her main research interests include studying youths’ identities and informal learning and teaching practices across spaces — including virtual, school, home, and informal spaces such as clubs and religious communities. Over the past two years she had spent innumerable hours in Whyville, a virtual world for tweens, studying Whyvillian news articles, an after-school club that played on Whyville, cheat sites about Whyville, becoming an established, wealthy citizen on Whyville and paying off her loan for an exclusive Whyville car.