Serious Play

Literacy, Learning and Digital Games

Catherine Beavis, Michael Dezuanni, Joanne O'Mara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134979110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Serious Play is a comprehensive account of the possibilities and challenges of teaching and learning with digital games in primary and secondary schools. Based on an original research project, the book explores digital games' capacity to engage and challenge, present complex representations and experiences, foster collaborative and deep learning and enable curricula that connect with young people today. These exciting approaches illuminate the role of context in gameplay as well as the links between digital culture, gameplay and identity in learners' lives, and are applicable to research and practice at the leading edge of curriculum and literacy development.

1

SERIOUS PLAY

Literacy, Learning and Digital Games

Catherine Beavis

Introduction

Young people’s social and cultural experiences are increasingly digital. Their everyday lives are characterised by digital play and online interaction, and their futures will involve work with digital texts, regardless of the career paths they follow. Digital games played on handheld devices, gaming consoles and computers have become a central part of young people’s daily lives for play, entertainment and social interaction. Increasingly, digital games are also being used in education, and the potential for digital games to transform learning has been the focus of increasing interest and research. Digital games, it is argued, have the capacity to engage and challenge players; present complex representations and experiences; foster collaborative learning; promote deep understanding; and enable curriculum and learning that effectively connect with the dispositions and orientations of young people today (Gee 2007; Davidson 2008; Whitton 2014).

Despite the acknowledgement of the potential of digital games for education and learning, it is less clear how games might be put to work effectively in schools, and what learning with games might look like in a range of educational contexts. In part, this lack of clarity results from the different, often conflicting, paradigms and underlying assumptions concerned with digital games, gameplay and learning; in part, from the lack of detailed, long-term studies of games-based learning over a range of contexts that recognise the diversity and granularity of students’ and teachers’ experience and dispositions towards games and gameplay. Not all students are games players. Not all teachers are keen advocates for the use of games, or experienced with using games to enhance learning in the classroom. While there are numerous studies of the use of games in individual classrooms, by teachers who are expert and experienced, there is little research that explores the use of games by a wider cohort of teachers and students: how this might happen, how it is experienced, what issues arise, and what learning, and of what kinds, might be achieved. Research is needed which shows ‘what happens when …’. This book presents case studies from specific classrooms undertaken across a range of schools, year levels and subject areas; and, through a range of lenses, looks across the experiences of teachers, students and schools over a period of three years, in a picture of developing complexity.

How to work with digital games is part of a wider set of concerns facing teachers, students and schools in the twenty-first century. The ways in which schools and teachers might work proactively in supporting students to become critical, capable and creative users of online forms; how they might make use of the powerful qualities and affordances offered by digital games to support learning; and how teaching, learning and curriculum are challenged, extended and changed by so doing, are all vexed but highly important questions for education and for educators. So too is the need for students’ familiarity with digital culture and digital literacies to be recognised and built upon in school, so that schooling overtly addresses and utilises the affordances of technology and the online world, building bridges between students’ experience in and out of school, while also more closely linking with twenty-first century forms of knowledge and representation, technologies, sensibilities and ecologies. How to recognise and work with digital games to achieve such ends, effectively and appropriately, and the implications of this for pedagogy, curriculum, relationships, skills and resources, were some of the central issues that teachers wrestled with in the project reported on in this book, in their work in classrooms with their students; in discussions with each other and with members of the project team, with the teachers and administrators at their schools, and with parents; and in planning and aligning their games-based work with centrally mandated curriculum and assessment policies and requirements.

Serious Play,¹ the project on which this book is based, set out to explore the diverse experiences and expectations of students and teachers in everyday schools, the ways they worked with games, the challenges entailed in doing so, and what the use of games was able to achieve. In presenting the work of Serious Play, this book brings together the fields of digital culture and new literacies, games-based learning and games studies, embedded within sociocultural perspectives that see learning as situated and purposeful, and literacy and literacy practices deeply intertwined with, and constitutive of, relationships, meaning making and identity. It similarly calls on media studies theory and research concerned with the production, analysis and consumption of media culture, and the role of digital culture in young people’s lives.

FIGURE 1.1 Year 8 Studies of Society and Environment students and Statecraft X.

Source: News Corp.

The chapter begins with a consideration of the issues for education in the context of the shape and locatedness of contemporary learning lives. Core issues here include recognition of the pervasiveness and importance of the internet and the online world; the need to understand more about digital culture, and the nature of young people’s engagement with it; and an awareness and understanding of the qualities and affordances of specific digital technologies and forms. From there, the discussion turns to participatory culture, and then specifically to digital games – games ‘in the wild’ – that is, out of school, and what they have to teach us about learning and literacy (Gee 2007). Games-based learning and the use of games in schools are introduced, together with a brief overview of the current state of research. The chapter then turns to the Serious Play project itself, and describes its aims, structure, organisation and activities. The ways in which teachers, students and researchers worked together and independently across the three years are outlined, as is the project design. The final part of the chapter outlines the structure of the book; discusses the five themes into which it is organised; and concludes with observations about three notable developments across the course of the project: the emergence of Minecraft (Mojang 2011) and its subsequent development; the rapid expansion of the use of tablets in schools; and the concept of ‘curation’ as a way to understand and make visible the nature of young people’s ownership and (re)creation of digital artefacts and culture.

Learning Lives, Schooling and Digital Games: Learning in the Twenty-First Century

In their book Identity, Community and Learning Lives in the Digital Age, Erstad and Sefton-Green (2013) used the phrase ‘learning lives’ to signal that learning needs to be situated intricately and intimately in a matrix of “transactions”: experiences, life trajectories, voluntary and involuntary learning contexts, affective frames and social groupings that make up experience across our “lifeworlds”, with associated attention to issues of identity and subjectivity, and ‘how we construct learner identities and narratives about what we know and do’ (p. 1).

The phrase also conjures the rhetorics and expectations associated with the view that learning is lifelong, and that learning should prepare one for life. Both aspects of ‘learning lives’ are of central relevance to the ways in which digital culture, particularly digital games, is understood, taken up and worked with to enhance learning in schools.

While the view that all students are ‘digital natives’ has long been problematised, it is nonetheless the case that for most children and teens living in places like Australia, Europe, the United States and the UK, the internet has been in existence for all of their lives, and, as the figures below suggest, is a significant part, for many, of the ways in which they interact, communicate and play. Playing digital games, for many teenagers and children, is part of a larger online ecology, encompassing engagement with an assemblage of online media forms, platforms and technologies, including games themselves of multiple kinds, virtual worlds, virtual realities, chat sites, forums, fan fiction sites, apps and all manner of social media. The Pew Research Center study, Teens, Social Media and Technology Overview 2015 (Lenhart 2015) found that 92 per cent of teens in the United States aged 13 to 17 were going online daily, over half (56 per cent) several times a day. This engagement was facilitated particularly by access to mobile devices, mainly phones, with 88 per cent having access to a mobile phone. Seventy-one per cent of teens played videogames in the same period – 59 per cent of girls and 84 per cent of boys – playing on a computer, game console or mobile phone (Lenhart 2015). In Australia, the 2014 Australian Communications and Media Authority report Aussie Teens Online (Raco 2014) found that 82 per cent of teens aged 14 to 17 years rated the internet as ‘very important’ or ‘extremely important’ in their lives, with ‘entertainment’ (90 per cent) topping activities undertaken online. The Digital Australia 2016 report (Brand and Todhunter 2015) found that videogame players in the Australian population included 77 per cent of children and young adults under the age of 18. The pattern is a familiar one elsewhere. A survey commissioned by the UK Internet Advertising Bureau, for example, released in 2014, found that 99 per cent of children and teenagers aged 8 to 17 in that country had played digital games in the previous six months (Stuart 2014).

Increasing usage of the internet is not all benign, however. By 2014, the ongoing EU Kids Online project, encompassing 25 European countries, found that as

children go on the internet more and more, and younger and younger, we can see that they are encountering many more opportunities, and they are developing skills, as they use the internet, but they are also encountering more of the risks.

(Livingstone 2014, n. p.)

The challenge Livingstone and her colleagues were repeatedly presented with by parents and educators responding to interviews and surveys was how to support those children in these interactions without exposing them to harm and risk. For many parents and educators, the answer seemed to be to simply reduce exposure. However, as Livingstone noted:

The struggle is that as we restrict children we also prevent them from gaining those learning opportunities which give them the chance to develop resilience and build skills, and also get many of the opportunities that the internet can offer. … Parents and educators are getting so worried that children are not gaining many of the opportunities that they could, and that the internet is so brilliant at providing, in terms of learning, participation, creativity and expression.

(Livingstone 2014, n. p.)

Rather than managing risk through avoidance, approaches that teach critical media literacy, and work proactively with media texts, technologies and literacies, are better placed to help students build resilience and informed and proactive participation. Such approaches enable the flow of perspectives, experiences and ideas to cross boundaries between in- and out-of-school engagements with the online world, strengthen students’ capacities to critically evaluate what they encounter online, and support them in becoming savvy, capable and discerning creators and consumers of digital culture (Buckingham 2016).

A related response to the significance of digital media in young people’s lives, and the potential for engagement and learning offered by digital texts and new media, focuses on the ways in which students’ experience with digital media may be shaping their expectations or orientations towards learning, and the ways in which work in school might reflect and respond to these. Young people’s experience with the online world, it is argued, promotes particular dispositions or orientations towards learning – new literacy practices and new habits of mind (Lankshear and Knobel 2006; Merchant 2009) such that their out-of-school experience and expectations flow into the ways in which they approach learning in schools.

Considerable research has been undertaken into the qualities and characteristics of online spaces and technologies together with the ways in which young people create, communicate, learn and engage. Such forms and spaces include digital games (Gee 2007; Marsh 2010), social media (boyd 2008; Davies 2013), blogs and/or other forms, as sites for engagement with what Jenkins et al. characterised as ‘participatory culture’:

A culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices. In a participatory culture members also believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with each other (at the least, members care about others’ opinions of what they have created).

(Jenkins et al. 2009, p. xi)

Such a culture, Jenkins and colleagues argued, provides numerous opportunities for learning and sharing, promotes diversification and the cultivation of a wide range of new media literacies’ social skills and cultural competencies, and ‘a more empowered conception of citizenship’ (p. xii).

Complementing Jenkins et al.’s (2009) account of participatory culture and the practices it entails are accounts of what was named at the time ‘Web 2.0’. Lankshear and Knobel (2006) described Web 2.0 not so much as a set of technological capabilities as ‘a developing trend or attitude’ (Merchant 2009, p. 108). Merchant highlighted four characteristics of such spaces: what they encouraged, what they made possible, and the kinds of participatory activity and literacy and learning practices they might entail:

1. Presence (‘Web 2.0 encourages users to develop an active presence through an online identity, profile ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Series Introduction Sara de Freitas and Paul Maharg
• 1 Serious Play: Literacy, Learning and Digital Games
• THEME I Student Approaches to Games-Based Learning
• THEME II Changing Gameplay for the Classroom Context
• THEME III Teachers’ Work and Games-Based Pedagogies
• THEME IV Digital Literacies in the Wild – Multimodality, Materiality and Embodiment
• THEME V Assessment, Digital Games and Teachers as Creative Professionals
• Post Script
• Index