Alexander Bacalja | University of Melbourne (original) (raw)

Papers by Alexander Bacalja

Postdigital Science and Education, 2024

This article is a collective response to the 2003 iteration of James Paul Gee's What Video Games ... more This article is a collective response to the 2003 iteration of James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Gee's book, a foundational text for those working in game studies, literacy studies, and education, identified 36 principles of 'good learning' which he argued were built into the design of good games, and which have since been used to unsettle the landscape of formal education. This article brings together 21 short theoretical and empirical contributions which centre postdigital perspectives to re-engage with, and extend, the arguments first raised by Gee regarding the relationship between videogames and learning. Organised into five groups, these contributions suggest that concepts and attitudes associated with the postdigital offer new thinking tools for challenging grand narrative claims about the educative potential of technologies while also providing rich analytical frames for revisiting Gee's claims in terms of postdigital videogame literacies.

Postdigital Science and Education, 2024

Discourses that establish the potential learning benefits of digital games for schooling too ofte... more Discourses that establish the potential learning benefits of digital games for schooling too often focus on learning as a product of relations between student and gameplay, adopting overly deterministic positions that have long been associated with digital technologies and education. This paper draws on ideas from postdigitalism to problematise such narrow conceptualisations of digital game-based learning (DGBL). The analysis of one Australian school's experience of incorporating digital games into their senior English curriculum provides a break from broad generations and allows a focus on the web of relations within which digital games exist when deployed in formal school contexts. An analytical framework which draws on three ideas emerging from postdigital studies is utilized to explore relations of power through which digital games interact as they are played and studied in schools. This analysis suggests that unitary logics about learning and digital games are insufficient and highlights the importance of engaging with the complexity, continuity and contingency in DGBL contexts to combat the hyperbole that surrounds digital games and education. Postdigital attention on actual instances of digital game deployment reveals the fragility of all knowledge claims about these technologies, contributing to a more critical discourse regarding their potential to impact school learning.

Ludic Language Pedagogy, 2024

Background: Digital games as technologies for teaching and learning are finding their way into sc... more Background: Digital games as technologies for teaching and learning are finding their way into schools with increasing frequency, raising questions about how teachers plan for their use. Aim: This paper utilises curriculum inquiry to explore the experiences of teachers designing curricula that centre digital games for play and study. Methods: We employ a memory work methodology to analyse four English teachers' reflections, emphasizing the value of reflecting on everyday actions to understand the complexity of professional lives and the situated nature of knowledge. Results: Our paper reveals that designing and implementing digital game-centred curricula is complex. The analysis of themes related to engaging with students' lifeworlds, planning for skills and knowledge, the challenges of play, and issues of access and equity, suggest use of technology for school learning is always inseparable from other phenomena, such as teaching methods, purposes, values and contexts. Conclusion: Those engaged in the design of game-centred curricula are in a constant state of negotiation which neither starts nor ends with the production of material artefacts. TWEET SYNOPSIS Designing digital game-centred curricula is complex work. We explore four teachers' experiences to examine the tensions that arise when digital games and school learning are brought together.

Language Arts, 2023

In this column, the author makes the case for using digital game stories in the language arts cl... more In this column, the author makes the case for using digital
game stories in the language arts classroom, juxtaposing
exemplary games with more traditional texts.

In 2003, James Paul Gee released What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, a... more In 2003, James Paul Gee released What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, a book that would become foundational for those working in game studies, literacy studies, and education. In the original version, Gee identified 36 principles of 'good learning' which he argued were built into the design of good games. Through an investigation of these principles, and their manifestation in popular games, Gee inspired a generation of scholars and teachers across fields to think and work with video games in ways that conceptualised their value in ways that moved beyond engagement. As a result of drawing comparisons between the presence of these principles in games and their absence in many school contexts, Gee positioned video games as educational technologies. This positioning has been used by scholars and edtech entrepreneurs alike to make a wide range of claims about the so-called learning 'affordances' of video games, and their potential to unsettle the landscape of formal education. The emergence of the postdigital as a concept for theorizing our relationships with digital technologies draws attention to the ways that such technologies shape the core of education (Knox 2019). The postdigital holds-to-account the broad cultural understandings that the term 'digital' has come to represent (Jandrić et al. 2019), rejecting techno-positivism innovation narratives (Cramer 2015). The tendency for postdigital perspectives to challenge grand narrative claims about the educative potential of digital technologies provides rich analytical frames for revisiting Gee's claims about the transformative learning benefits associated with playing, making, and studying videogames. If we are moving into a critical post-videogaming phase (Koutsogiannis 2022), what might this mean for the generation of questions that produce new insights into Gee's seminal work? How might shifts from video game literacies to postdigital literacies (Apperley 2016), and the associated entanglements between technologies and social practices, lead us to rethink Gee's 36 principles? In this call we invite you to submit 500-word responses which consider postdigital reconfigurations of Gee's (2003) What videogames have to teach us about learning and literacy.

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 2023

Purpose: This paper explores the characteristics of playful literacies in case study research exa... more Purpose: This paper explores the characteristics of playful literacies in case study research examining digital games in secondary English classrooms. It analyses how educators utilise play as a resource for meaning-making and the impacts of play on student learning. Design/methodology/approach: The authors used a keyword search of relevant academic databases to identity articles within specified search parameters. This was followed by bibliographic branching to identify additional articles. Following the identification of 30 articles, two rounds of open coding were utilised to identify themes for analysis. Findings: The literature revealed five types of playful pedagogical practices: singleplayer gameplay, turn-taking gameplay, multiplayer play, play-as-design, and little or no gameplay. Discussion of these findings suggest that classroom play was a highly social activity across case studies. Furthermore, boundaries between types of play and their contributions to learning were blurred and often disrupted normative approaches to curriculum and teaching. Originality: Given the novelty of replacing traditional texts with digital games in English classrooms, this study represents an important moment to pause and review the literature to date on a particular, understudied aspect of digital games in English curricula: their playfulness. This is especially important given the innovative ways in which digital play can shift thinking about meaning-making and narrative, two historically dominant concerns within the discipline of English.

Ludic Language Pedagogy, 2023

This is the first paper in a three-part series which examines digital game literacies and school ... more This is the first paper in a three-part series which examines digital game literacies and school learning. This paper (Part 1) argues that conceptualizing digital game literacies within sociocultural approaches to literacy provides educators with ways of thinking about digital games and learning that move beyond the hype often associated with new digital technologies in education. I begin by exploring how sociocultural approaches to literacy provide a useful foundation for rethinking how digital games are deployed within the social and cultural contexts of schools. I then analyze evolving definitions of digital game literacies, before demonstrating why bridging these practices with school learning does not always produce the outcomes teachers and researchers might wish for. This paper offers a foundation for moving beyond discourses of digital game based learning that privilege the medium and instead focuses more closely on what teachers and students do with these technologies within the disciplinary constraints of formal schooling.

Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 2022

This paper explores how changing digital literacy practices in educational contexts require that ... more This paper explores how changing digital literacy practices in educational contexts require that we continually revisit conceptualisations of digital literacy education. We begin by analysing the positions taken by stakeholders who contribute to digital literacy discourses in Australia, exploring how competing interests produce effects which manifest in ways that differently consecrate social and cultural practice in the digital age. We advocate the need for pedagogic frameworks that support digital literacy education. Existing approaches tend to privilege the operationalisation of digital technology. By contrast, teaching is needed which focusses on meaning-making and creating. However, the 'datafication of everyday life' (Barassi, 2018, p.170) has included extraordinary interventions into schooling that have significant implications for teachers and students. We argue that preparing young people for digital citizenship must include a focus on critical digital literacies that are responsive to contemporary digital forces (e.g. platformatisation, artificial intelligence, edu-apps, algorithms) as well as those digital technologies that are yet to make their way into formal schooling.

Bringing Critical Media Literacy into ELA Classrooms - Volume 2, 2022

L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 2022

This paper reviews research into the use of digital games in the L1 English classroom. It deals s... more This paper reviews research into the use of digital games in the L1 English classroom. It deals specifically with qualitative case study research investigating the potentialities of these new social, cultural and textual forms. The aim is to provide a critical review of the research to identify how teachers have been using these new forms of meaning making and to explore the literate practices associated with the study of digital games in the English classroom, as well as the games selected and the forms of classroom play utilised. Analysis of the 16 studies which met the inclusion criteria reveals that digital game literacies present opportunities for meeting the historical imperatives of English teaching, but also for providing new ways of thinking about how we support students to know themselves and the world. Connecting with students' lifeworlds, developing traditional and contemporary skills, questioning representations within texts, and supporting the aesthetic dimension of textual experience, were reported to be important outcomes that could be achieved through learning about digital games in English.

Asia Pacific Journal of Education

This paper explores how Australian literature mandated for study in the Victorian senior English ... more This paper explores how Australian literature mandated for study in the Victorian senior English curriculum creates opportunities for problematizing central myths about Australia. We engage with Homi Bhabha’s notion of ambivalence to demonstrate how representations of colonization, rurality and migration reflect discursive formations of Australia. We consider how each discourse serves a pedagogic function, essentializing a set of myths about Australia: as having redeemed the violence done to Indigenous Australians in the colonial period, as embodying a white, rural masculine ideal, and as a welcoming nation open to migrants. Here, we show the points of orientation these texts provide, in their rearticulations of “the scraps … of daily life”, and further consider how the texts can problematize nationalist narratives.

How do English teachers bring social justice movements associated with these events into the clas... more How do English teachers bring social justice movements associated with these events into the classroom for younger students to explore? Should we even attempt such work, given the confronting and challenging themes likely to arise? While the senior English classroom is often lauded for the possibilities that come with having a more mature group of learners, there is understandable apprehension when it comes to designing curriculum that introduces younger students to these serious issues.

The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 2018

Through the proliferation of digital technologies and the increasing accessibility of video games... more Through the proliferation of digital technologies and the increasing accessibility of video games, young people are engaging with these texts today, more than ever. However, there is a growing concern regarding what exactly young people are taking away from these textual experiences. This paper responds to the call made by Comber (1993), to document multiple cases of critical literacies developed in different contexts. It reports findings from a study which used video games as the focus texts in a middle-years English classroom in Melbourne, Australia. It found that critical literacy pedagogies could be effectively used to build new understandings with this everyday text-type.

Young people write themselves into being through online forms of expression characterised by lite... more Young people write themselves into being through online forms of expression characterised by literate digital practices. This paper focuses on the characteristics of writing in authentic digital spaces. It begins by introducing new understandings about writing, summarising the research literature associated with new literacies and the impact of new technological ‘stuff ’ and new ethos ‘stuff ’ (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). An analysis of writing practices from one online community, typical of the digital sites frequented by middle years’ students, is then conducted, demonstrating how the literacy practices enacted by its members reflect many of the salient shifts in writing that Merchant (2007) argues characterise digital literacy. The distinctive features of these forms of expression compel literacy and English teachers to reconsider what constitutes the writing classroom so that relevance is promoted within contemporary communicative contexts.

This paper explores the learning affordances associated with Gee’s notion of the projective ident... more This paper explores the learning affordances associated with Gee’s notion of the projective identity principle. A case study introducing game-as-text into the English classroom is used to explore how the relationship between virtual and real-world identities is mediated by student habitus, game design, and classroom pedagogy.

English in Australia, 2019

This paper reports findings from a study investigating trends in character, historical setting, a... more This paper reports findings from a study investigating trends in character, historical setting, authorship and themes across Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) text selection lists between 2010 and 2019. We address the fictionalisation and imagining of Australian history through narratives about Indigeneity and settler-colonisation. While we will describe positive trends that have emerged over time, by and large this study agrees with Leane's (2016) and Langton's (1993) assertions regarding the transmission of knowledge and representation of Indigeneity and Australian history in the classroom; namely, there is an under-representation of Indigenous authors, poets, playwrights, film directors, and complex, non-stereotypical charactertypes and an over-representation of non-Indigenous authors representing themes and stories of Indigeneity, reconciliation and colonisation.

This paper reports on a participatory action research project which used videogames as the centra... more This paper reports on a participatory action research project which used videogames as the central texts for play and study in a middle-years English classroom in Australia. Ongoing questions about the nature of subject English have often focused on the discipline's ability to accommodate twenty-first century literacies. Videogames, as increasingly popular and digital forms of texts, are often praised for their ability to engage students (Gee, 2003), yet less is understood about the pedagogies necessary to enable the rigorous study of these texts in classroom contexts. This study found while that existing conceptual and pedagogic models of subject English can be adopted and adapted to suit the unique affordances of this text type, issues associated with play and interactivity complicate the use of videogames in the classroom. It offers a new contribution to the evolving field of study associated with games as texts (Beavis, Dezuanni, and O'Mara, 2017). The study has implications for those seeking to engage more closely with students' textual worlds but unsure of how to negotiate videogames' intrinsic textual features.

Postdigital Science and Education, 2024

Ludic Language Pedagogy, 2024

Language Arts, 2023

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 2023

Ludic Language Pedagogy, 2023

Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 2022

Bringing Critical Media Literacy into ELA Classrooms - Volume 2, 2022

L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 2022

Asia Pacific Journal of Education

The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 2018

English in Australia, 2019

DIGRAA22 Conference, 2022

Postcolonial literary theorists have used the term ‘worlding’ to explain the effects all texts ha... more Postcolonial literary theorists have used the term ‘worlding’ to explain the effects all texts have in world-making. Edward Said (1983) argues that all texts are worldy, because they are compiled, composed and read in the world, while for Hayot (2012), worlding is not an act of replication or capture, but inclusion and exclusion, “To world is to enclose, but also to exclude. What falls in the ambit of those enclosures and exclusions will determine the political meaning of any given act of world-making” (2012, 40). Donna Haraway’s (2013) use of worlding as a verb, and as a generative practice and a contributing factor in knowledge making and world making, is particularly important given this paper’s interest in how digital games are played and studied in school-based contexts.

English in Aotearoa, 2019

As the growth of digital device ownership amongst today’s students has increased, English teacher... more As the growth of digital device ownership amongst today’s students has
increased, English teachers face questions about what role digital texts
might play in the English classroom as objects of study.

DIGRA Conference Abstract, 2019

This paper presents initial findings from a qualitative eight-week case study which introduced on... more This paper presents initial findings from a qualitative eight-week case study which introduced one digital game, Never Alone (Upper One Games, 2014) into the English classroom of an Australian secondary school for sustained play and study. The notion that digital games represent forms of cultural production worthy of study and attention within school systems has been advocated for some time (Beavis, 1997; Gee, 2003; Squire, 2003). Games as contemporary pedagogical aids- to mediate learning inside and outside of formal educational contexts- have been the focus of much attention (Gee, Shaffer, Halverson, & Squire, 2005; Prensky, 2007; Steinkuehler, Squire, & Barab, 2012). The notion of games-as-text in the English classroom presents a unique set of pedagogical challenges. Learning through games and learning about games are complicated by the need to bridge discipline-specific ways of knowing and doing English with the textual uniqueness of digital games.

DIGRA Australia, 2019

This paper reports on a research project incorporating videogames into the English classroom for ... more This paper reports on a research project incorporating videogames into the English classroom for play and study. Videogames have long been lauded for their capacity to engage audiences through immersive gameplay and rich narratives (Bogost, 2007; Gee, 2004). This work tends to privilege the interactive elements of gameplay and the impact of rich textual environments as facilitators of a range of literacy practices. This study explores the extent to which games can be studied as text within current curriculum frames, demonstrating how curriculum requirements for English enable some videogame features to be adopted and adapted for integration, whilst others are excluded.

Young people write themselves into being through online forms of expression characterised by lite... more Young people write themselves into being through online forms of expression characterised by literate digital practices. This paper focuses on the characteristics of writing in authentic digital spaces. It begins by introducing new understandings about writing, summarising the research literature associated with new literacies and the impact of new technological 'stuff' and new ethos 'stuff' (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). An analysis of writing practices from one online community, typical of the digital sites frequented by middle years' students, is then conducted, demonstrating how the literacy practices enacted by its members reflect many of the salient shifts in writing that Merchant (2007) argues characterise digital literacy. The distinctive features of these forms of expression compel literacy and English teachers to reconsider what constitutes the writing classroom so that relevance is promoted within contemporary communicative contexts.