Michelle Backstrom

Defining entertainment: an approach

Entertainment is a key cultural category. Yet the definition of entertainment can differ depending upon whom one asks. This article maps out understandings of entertainment in three key areas. Within industrial discourses, entertainment is defined by a commercial business model. Within evaluative discourses used by consumers and critics, it is understood through an aesthetic system that privileges emotional engagement, story, speed and vulgarity. Within academia, entertainment has not been a key organizing concept within the humanities, despite the fact that it is one of the central categories used by producers and consumers of culture. It has been important within psychology, where entertainment is understood in a solipsistic sense as being anything that an individual finds entertaining. Synthesizing these approaches, the authors propose a cross-sectoral definition of entertainment as ‘audience-centred commercial culture’.

“Ruby’s Music Festival”: developing problem-solving skills using online scenarios and creating opportunities to feed forward

One of the characteristics of good teaching is giving the highest quality feedback on student work, but the term “feedback” is most commonly associated with summative assessment given by a teacher after work is completed. The student can often be a passive participant in the process. This article looks at the implementation of web-based scenarios completed by students prior to summative assessment with the objective of improving legal problem-solving skills. It examines the design process and the implementation of the problem-solving activity and the approach to teaching and learning taken in the new law unit of which it is part. We argue that such activities are effective tools to feed forward and reflect on the implications for the effective teaching of law in higher education.