The Classroom Connection:

English and Computer Games

Catherine Beavis
Griffith 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 games
Australian Research Council 2007-2010
(Beavis, Bradford, O’mara, Walsh; Apperly and Gutierrez)

• Computer games as • 2 metropolitan

text, narrative and play secondary state schools
• Young people and their • 1 metropolitan Catholic
immersion in global boys college
media culture • 1 regional metropolitan
• Teachers: constructions Catholic boys college
of literacy and English, • 1 independent
action research and metropolitan school
professional
development
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
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Across texts, modes, genres…

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 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)

Picks of the draft: Tyrone Vickery

Emma Quayle | November 27, 2008
SPORT FROM: The Sandringham Dragons and Haileybury
College, where Vickery has played after recovering
International from a season-ending knee injury in early 2007. He
AFL Football statistician counts sex 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…

o a ch p o n d e rs o ver new recruits

Freo c
08 - 12:20PM
November 25, 20 ing on their tough
est
an tl e e m b a rk
With Frem y is
-s e as o n e ve r, coach Mark Harve
pre new
e ri ng ho w to in tegrate up to 14
pond night
rs tha t w ill a rr ive in the next fort
playe
AFL drafts…
via the upcoming
[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?