The Classroom Connection: English and Computer Games

Catherine BeavisGriffith University

c.beavis@griffith.edu.au

ESRC Seminar Series: Children’s and young people’s digital literacies in virtual online spaces

Working with games as text in the English classroom

• What kinds of literacy and learning, what kinds of texts are games?

• Working with games: definitions of text and literacy, constructions of English, pedagogy and assessment, classroom challenges

• How to recognise the multifaceted nature of games as text and action, as narrative and play, as socially and culturally situated, and as having resonance beyond the classroom?

Literacy in the digital world of the twenty first century: learning from computer gamesAustralian Research Council 2007-2010

(Beavis, Bradford, O’mara, Walsh; Apperly and Gutierrez)

• Computer games as text, narrative and play

• Young people and their immersion in global media culture

• Teachers: constructions of literacy and English, action research and professional development

• 2 metropolitan secondary state schools

• 1 metropolitan Catholic boys college

• 1 regional metropolitan Catholic boys college

• 1 independent metropolitan school

School based projects

Key concepts

• Convergence/convergence culture(Jenkins)• Intertextuality– Literary perspectives and parameters– Reading across genres and across on and offline

contexts– Paratexts (Consalvo/Genette)

• Situatedness• Critical literacy • Production and response

• You can’t really get at the meaning of various forms piecemeal: you have to integrate the text with its fellow travellers, cross-contextualising them by one another, to get at the kinds of meanings being made and stored’ (Lemke 2007, cited in Alverman 2008 p 15).

• Communication through images, sounds and digital media, when combined with print literacy may be changing the way we read certain kinds of texts, but online and offline literacies are not polar opposites. To reify distinctions between them serves mainly to limit understandings of how each informs the other (Alverman 2008 p 16)

• Paratexts: texts and the surrounding materials that frame their consumption, shape the readers experience of a text & give meaning to the act of reading (Genette 1997/ Consalvo 2007)

Convergence

Kangaroos dynamo Brent Harvey will be even harder to

stop as leaderRebecca Williams | November 27, 2008 12:00am

Brisbane Lions may be a Devine home for Ben Cousins

Staff writers | November 27, 2008 12:00am

•Sheeds is Oz 'thinker of the year' AFL greatSheedy has broken that train of thought and has been awarded Australia's "Thinker…founder of SOT says, "Kevin Sheedy is a strategic thinker, a person that pushes the boundaries and consistently…24 Jun 2008 | Herald Sun > Victoria | article | Find related (http:/heraldsun.com.au)

Across texts, modes, genres…

Paratexts: texts and the surrounding materials that frame their consumption, shape the readers experience of a text & give meaning to the act of reading (Genette 1997/ Consalvo 2007 p.9)

SPORTInternationalAFL Football statistician counts sex

Picks of the draft: Tyrone VickeryEmma Quayle | November 27, 2008 FROM: The Sandringham Dragons and Haileybury College, where Vickery has played after recovering from a season-ending knee injury in early 2007. He played for Vic Metro in this year's under-18 national championships THE NUMBERS: Born 31 May, 1990, 200 centimetres, 89 kilograms.THE LOWDOWN: Vickery is a ruckman, and spent much of his time out injured studying the subtleties of ruck work. But he is also a strong mark, and it's easy to envisage him becoming, at 200 centimetres and with pace, a powerful centre half-forward…

Freo coach ponders over new recruits

November 25, 2008 - 12:20PM

With Fremantle embarking on their toughest

pre-season ever, coach Mark Harvey is

pondering how to integrate up to 14 new

players that will arrive in the next fortnight

via the upcoming AFL drafts…

[I go with] whoever I think has the more valid… whoever I valued their opinion more. I suppose certain people like Sam Newman, he tends to know not that much compared to someone like who’s an actual expert like a columnist or something. [Depending on] their background, like their background of the game, most experienced within the game I’ll probably value more. (Kevin)

Working with games in the classroom

• What’s easy?• What’s hard?