Play-school: Linking culture and curriculum through games-based learning in schools

Abstract

Game-based learning is proliferating in formal school classrooms, yet to date there is relatively little evidence to demonstrate its effects on teachers' pedagogies. This paper provides analysis from two studies of computer games use in authentic classroom settings. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which practising classroom teachers discuss and describe games-based learning in relation to their curricular intentions and their less formal cultural assumptions about the relevance of gaming to young people outside of school. Data is from two empirical studies of games-based teaching and learning in school classrooms in the UK. The first project, "Teaching with Games," explored how teachers might develop practical pedagogies to facilitate games-based learning using commercially-developed games in authentic classroom contexts. The second project, "Computer Games, Schools and Young People," took the form of a quantitative and qualitative study of existing games-based learning practices in schools in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The study demonstrated that while teachers are concerned to meet some emerging professional and curricular goals, they also base their games-based pedagogies on a set of popular cultural assumptions. This presentation provides analysis of classroom observations and interviews with the participating classroom teachers and derives a series of discussions about their emerging curricular and cultural understandings of games-based learning, and how these understandings translate into pedagogic practice.