Catherine Beavis

Computer games, culture and curriculum

From the Publisher: Hypertext, email, word-processing: electronic technologies have revolutionized the way we write language. How does language on screen work differently from language on the page? What new literacy skills are needed and how do we teach them? Page to Screen collects some of the best contemporary thinkers in the fields of literacy and technology to discuss the impacts of new media on language. The contributors analyze the potential of new forms of text, the increased emphasis on visual representation, new forms of rhetoric, learning in the age of global communication networks and new approaches to storytelling. Timely and important, this collection tackles important questions about the future of language and the way we use and teach it. the page.

Would the ‘real’ girl gamer please stand up? Gender, LAN cafés and the reformulation of the ‘girl’ gamer

In this paper we consider the significance of cyber ‘LAN’ cafés as sites where on and off‐line practices meet in way that complicates binary notions of the gendered gamer. Existing research into computer games culture suggests a male dominated environment and points to girls’ lower levels of competence and participation in games. Building on recent studies interested in the constitution of gender through engagement with online technologies, we draw on Judith Butler’s politics of performative resignification, and conceptualise digital culture as a resource through which ‘girl’ gamers are mobilised and potentially reformulated, experiencing their gaming identities in contradictory ways, and fragmenting the category ‘girl’ in the very act of articulating their place in a male dominated gaming culture. It is argued that through the meeting of on and off‐line practices, LAN cafés operate as a location that is particularly amenable to reformulative work in relation to gendered gaming identities.

LAN cafes: cafes, places of gathering or sites of informal teaching and learning?

Despite the interest of sociologists and educational researchers in Internet cafés as sites for new cultural and social formations and informal learning, thus far little attention has been paid to the function of café owners, managers and other staff in the mediation and co‐construction of those spaces. Drawing from interviews with managers of commercial Internet cafés in Australia specialising in LAN (Local Area Network) gaming, this article seeks to examine their role and their attitudes more closely; in particular with regard to school‐aged users of their facilities. We contend that LAN cafés are liminal spaces situated at the margins of Australian culture and located at the junctions between home, school and the street, online and offline spaces, work and play. The roles of LAN café managers are similarly ambiguous: in many ways they can be regarded as informal teachers facilitating the process of informal learning.

Challenging Notions of Gendered Game Play: Teenagers playing The Sims

This paper challenges notions of gendered game playing practice implicit in much research into young womens involvement with the computer gaming culture. It draws on a study of Australian teenagers playing The Sims Deluxe as part of an English curriculum unit and insights from feminist media studies to explore relationships between gender and game playing practices. Departing from a reliance on predetermined notions of “gender”, “domestic space”, and “successful game play”, it conceptualizes The Sims as a game in which the boundaries between gender and domestic space are disturbed. It argues that observing students’ constructions of gender and domestic space through the act of game play itself provides a more productive insight into the gendered dimensions of game play for educators wishing to work computer games such as The Sims into curriculum development.

Literacy in the digital age: Learning from computer games

Abstract The need for literacy and the English curriculum to attend to digital literacies in the twenty‐first century is well established. Although studies in digital literacies have examined the inclusion of computer games in schools, there has not been an extended study of English teachers incorporating computer games into their teaching and learning through action research projects. This paper outlines the structure and progress of a research project exploring the uses of computer games in English classrooms. We argue that much can be learned about the teaching of both print and digital literacies from examining computer games and young people’s engagement in online digital culture in the world beyond school.

Redstone Is Like Electricity: Children's Performative Representations in and around "Minecraft".

This article investigates 8- and 9-year-old girls’ use of the popular game Minecraft at home and school, particularly the ways in which they performatively ‘bring themselves into being’ through talk and digital production in the social spaces of the classroom and within the game’s multiplayer online world. We explore how the girls undertake practices of curatorship to display their Minecraft knowledge through discussion of the game, both ‘in world’ and in face-to-face interactions, and as they assemble resources within and around the game to design, build and display their creations and share stories about their gameplay.

Literary English and the Challenge of Multimodality

How to understand and argue for the nature and place of literary texts and experience in contemporary English curriculum has been and continues to be the subject of much debate. While literature as traditionally conceptualised remains an important presence in much English curriculum, the notion of what ‘literature’ is, or what the category of ‘literary’ texts and cultural forms might encompass, in a context where literacy is understood as multimodal and English and literacy curriculum addresses multimodal literacies accordingly, is less clear. This paper addresses two areas with respect to literature and literature teaching in the digital age: first, issues surrounding the ways in which national curriculum guidelines in England and Australia envisage the teaching of literature, in principle and in practice; and second, the challenges presented to print-based conceptions of literature and literature teaching within English by significantly broader conceptualisations of literature encompassing a range of aesthetic multimodal texts and forms. The kinds of insights, experience and understandings generated through the study and creation of literary and aesthetic texts in English, it is argued, are now needed more than ever. However, as literary experience becomes increasingly transmodal, how English seeks to manage media shift to encompass both print and digital forms remains a challenging issue.

Writing, digital culture and English curriculum

In their out-of-school lives, young people are immersed in rich and complex digital worlds, characterised by image and multimodality. Computer games in particular present young people with specific narrative genres and textual forms: contexts in which meaning is constructed interactively and drawing explicitly on a wide range of design elements including sound, image, gesture, symbol, colour and so on. As English curriculum seeks to address the changing nature of literacy, challenges are raised, particularly with respect to the ways in which multimodal texts might be incorporated alongside print based forms of literacy. Questions focus both on the ways in which such texts might be created, studied and assessed, and on the implications of the introduction of such texts for print based literacies. This paper explores intersections between writing and computer games within the English classroom, from a number of junior secondary examples. In particular it considers tensions that arise when young people use writing to recreate or respond to multimodal forms. It explores ways in which writing is stretched and challenged by enterprises such as these, ways in which students utilise and adapt print based modes to represent multimodal forms of narrative, and how teachers and curriculum might respond. Consideration is given to the challenges posed to teaching and assessment by bringing writing to bear as the medium of analysis of, and response to, multimodal texts.

Young people, online gaming culture, and education

The capacity of video games to engage and challenge players through increasingly complex and demanding stages and the range of cognitive, linguistic, and sociocultural practices generated by games and game play have led to increased interest in the use and study of video games in schools. Views of digital games as “hard fun” or “serious play” have important implications for education, problematizing assumptions about what students can and might be asked to do, about teaching and learning, and about the ways in which curriculum is resourced and organized. To fully capitalize on games’ potential to enrich learning, the nature of play, the kinds of play entailed in playing games of varying genres, the experience of game play in and out of school, and the relationship between them all need to be carefully considered and explored.

Multimodal Literacy, Digital Games and Curriculum

Games are viewed as embodying core principles of good pedagogy and learning, however, it is essential that games are not understood simply as ‘learning machines’. Rather, good gameplay is active, socially situated and purposeful, and intimately linked with issues of ownership, commitment and identity. This chapter focuses particularly on the textual dimensions of games and gameplay, within the context of the New Media Age, Multiliteracies and literacy constructed as design, and the ways in which the capacity to read and act upon multimodal literacies enables reasoning and analysis, and the successful progress of play. It takes the example of the citizenship education mobile learning game, Statecraft X, to explore and illustrate matters such as these. It explores and illustrates some of the multimodal forms of reading, literacy and interactions required to make sense of the game, the ways in which doing so enabled students to arrive at new insights and understandings about governance and citizenship, and the kinds of investment, reasoning and assumptions required to do so.