project overview
Literacy remains one of the central aims of schooling but the ways in which it is understood are changing. The growth of the networked society and the spread of information and communications technology has brought significant changes to traditional literacy. This project aims to improve understandings about new forms of literacy as they appear in digital popular culture (computer games); and about the ways in which young people engage with them. It aims to find ways to use this knowledge to strengthen the teaching of print and multimodal literacies and will provide theoretical models and practical resources to do so.
The project is investigating theways in which English and literacy education might benefit from examining popular digital culture, and the ways in which young people make use of it, to improve the teaching of print and multimodal forms of literacy. It takes computer games as examples of global, ICT-based popular culture, where meaning is built from multimodal elements, and where young players have to be actively learning and involved in oder to play. Working with English teachers and secondary students who are computer games players, tthe project addresses five main questions:
- What kinds of texts are computer games, and how do they combine multimodal elements to create meanings and values?
- What kinds of literacy and learning practices are adolescents involved in as they play computer games; how do they make sense of them, and how are they affected by them?
- What do computer games and adolescents’ engagement with them have to teach us about how to teach both print and multimodal texts and literacies, and to update and strengthen English and literacy curriculum?
- How can we use teaching and learning about multimodal texts to increase the literacy levels and engagement of marginalised students, particularly boys and those in the middle years?
- What kinds of approaches, models and resources are needed to support teachers in the development and implementation of ICT-based curriculum that addresses both print and multimodal forms of literacy?
To address these questions the project brings together a team from Deakin University, the Research and Innovation section of the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD), the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English (VATE) and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). This combination is uniquely equipped to undertake this highly innovative and important study, which will take English and literacy curriculum and e-learning approaches to teaching, forward in Victorian government schools, with implications for the education community more broadly in Australia and internationally. Through a combination of an online survey, close study of individual expert games players, analysis of a range of popular computer games, the development of a model for games analysis and education, and a three year program of action-research based professional development, the project will:
- develop detailed and specific information for teachers about the forms literacy takes in multimodal texts generated by ICT
- identify the kinds of literacy practices young Australians are engaged in as they play computer games
- identify the ways in which computer games shape young people’s values and sense of identity
- develop, trial and evaluate a model for computer games education and teacher professional development
- develop classroom approaches for analysing and digital texts such as computer games, and for teaching with and about such texts to strengthen understandings of both print and multimodal forms of literacy.
The project responds to calls for schools to recognise and respond to rapidly changing forms and definitions of literacy brought about by ICT (Kress 1997; New London Group 1996) and to develop e-learning approaches to teaching and curriculum that reflect the central role of technology in the twenty-first century. Contemporary definitions of literacy emphasise the expansion brought about by ICTs in the ‘changed communicational landscape’ (Kress 2000) of the present day. Luke, Freebody and Land (2000:20) define the literacy young people need in this new context as ‘the sustained and flexible mastery of a repertoire of practices with the texts of traditional and new communications technologies via spoken language, print and multimedia.