Videogames, chaotic playfulness, and the English national curriculum

Alison will draw on her own classroom interventions as a teacher-researcher, exploring digital and creative methods as ‘third text’ proxies to enable students to access challenging GCSE texts.

After 2013's significant curriculum revisions, teachers of secondary English found themselves leading students towards qualifications that disregarded media texts, failed to recognise the multiple literacies demanded by the world outside of the classroom, de-emphasised ‘speaking and listening’ skills, and offered set literary text choices limited in scope and diversity.

Alison will discuss the conditions required for students to become ‘immersed’ or ‘engaged’ in their studies of texts, with a specific focus on amateur videogame design as the creative method, and additional diversion into stop motion animation, drawing, and free-form creative writing.

This event will be particularly useful to teacher, academics, and all those interested in education, the secondary school curriculum, and media literacy in schools.

Please note this is a hybrid event and can be joined either in-person or online.

Links

• UCL Knowledge Lab
• Department of Culture, Communication and Media

Image

Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash.