Computerspil og literacy i skolen

Computerspil er en kilde til underholdning, spænding – og tidsfordriv – i mange børn og unges fritid. Men kan de også spille en rolle i skolen? Ja, mener den australske professor Catherine Beavis, der til sommer gæster Danmark.

Besøget er arrangeret i et samarbejde mellem AAlborg Universitet (Center for Anvendt Spilforskning), professionshøjskolen UCC og Nationalt Videncenter for Læsning.

Catherine Beavis’ forskning er centreret om computerspil og elevers måder at navigere og orientere sig gennem spil. Hun har undersøgt, hvordan spil fungerer som nye tekst-verdener og kobler i sin seneste forskning literacy og læring til spilkompetencer.

Den 13. juni holder hun et oplæg om spil og literacy på Campus Carlsberg i København. Her fortæller hun om sit seneste forskningsprojekt, der handler om, hvordan man kan bruge computerspil i skolen: Serious Play: Using digital games in school to promote literacy and learning in the twenty first Century.

Program

Kl.10.00 Registrering, kaffe og croissant

Kl. 10.30 – 12.00
Literacy, Learning and Digital Games: games as text and action and Serious Play
Catherine Beavis, Professor of Education at Deakin University

In an expanded view of literacy, where multiliteracies and multimodal texts are seen as a central part of young people’s textual worlds, the incorporation and study of digital texts within English and Language arts areas has become an important priority. Amongst multimodal texts, and in teaching and employing multimodal literacy forms, digital games in many ways lead the way, However, conceiving of games in purely textual terms is not straight forward, with the construction of games primarily as narrative or text, or text, raising major questions. Games come into existence only when played, and are centrally driven by action. With respect to Literacy, and multimodal forms of meaning making, a key challenge is how to think about and understand games as both, and to recognise and respond to the specificities of the form, which encompass both. Drawing on the Serious Play project, a three-year Australian Research Council Funded project across ten Australian schools focused on literacy, learning and digital games, this presentation looks at how teachers planned the use of digital games to promote literacy learning of various kinds, and the ways in which both traditional and digital forms of meaning-making were called into play. It maps the work done by teachers and students against a model for thinking about games as both text and action, and explores the kinds of ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ students in project classrooms undertook as they played and made games.