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This study answered how different families' resource holdings shape the aspirations and international education trajectory of secondary schools students who demonstrate specific patterns of social and cultural adaptation to Australia's schooling. It highlighted the emerging symbolic capital afforded by deep engagement with specific digital platforms for producing students' aspirational self. The findings pointed to transnational social relationships, community and school resources and educational policies being critical to shaping students' education experience far from home.

Children are often positioned as consumers of digital games, but what happens when they become the creators and producers of their own games? This chapter describes a digital game-making project in a Year 3/4 classroom where young students made their own digital games using the block coding program Scratch. While this project cuts across several curriculum areas, it was primarily designed as a Language and Literacies project with written composition at the centre.The case study data used in this chapter was collected from one teacher, Nick, and his Year 3/4 classes over a three-year period. While coding work in schools is generally located in Science, Technology and Mathematics education (STEM), Nick drew upon the affordances of Scratch to develop a strong language arts/ literacies focus through a game-making unit. In this way, the unit cuts across the curriculum, addressing many of the STEM standards in addition to those of Language and Literacy.

Literacy, Learning, and Digital Games is a comprehensive account of the possibilities and challenges of teaching and learning with digital games in primary and secondary schools. Based on an original research project, the book explores digital games’ capacity to engage and challenge, present complex representations and experiences, foster collaborative and deep learning, and enable curricula that connect with young people today. These exciting approaches illuminate the role of context in gameplay as well as the links between digital culture, gameplay, and identity in learners’ lives, and are applicable to research and practice at the leading edge of curriculum and literacy development.

Full Text, Thesis (Professional Doctorate), Doctor of Education (EdD), School of Education and Professional Studies, Arts, Education and Law, Young adolescents today are growing up in an environment rich in digital technology. They are highly connected with their technology always on and always on them. In this digital culture there are consistent concerns regarding the impact of this new way of being, and adult-generated concerns include perceived diminished childhood, bullying and fear which dominate much of the widely held understanding of the digital culture which these young people inhabit. In this culture of fear and in the context of schools, adult-generated strategies for enhancing the experience of young people engaging with social networking is generally the norm and student voice is repressed. In contrast, this study set out to explore the experience of young people with respect to their engagement with social networking, through the privileging of student voice rather than assuming that adult knowledge be applied. Specifically, students aged from approximately 12-16 years, in the middle years of schooling (Years 7-9), are the subject of this study as they constitute the years where rapid growth and development, identity formation and establishing practices associated with social networking occur.

Full Text, Thesis (Professional Doctorate), Doctor of Education (EdD), School of Education and Professional Studies, Arts, Education and Law, Responding to the escalation of technological educational tools and the expectation of technology delivering educational miracles, this research addresses the need to understand more about the ways in which technology impacts classroom practice, roles and relationships. It analyses the perceived roles of students and teachers in responding to an ICT integrated poetry unit, responds to the Australian Curriculum imperative for subject English to increase the integration of ICTs, and examines the perceived pedagogical and learning effect on teachers and students regarding integrating ICTs into subject English. The research investigates the perceived professional skills, attitudes and abilities of teachers as they balanced the dual concepts of the facilitation and control of student learning as well as the pedagogical encounters students experience in the world of technology and learning. The research question was: ‘How might the roles and relationships of teachers and students change when using ICTs in a middle school English curriculum, specifically, a Year 9 poetry unit?’ The research setting for the project was a regional, private boys’ secondary school as they engaged with an integrated computer technology poetry unit online delivered. The school was transitioning to a one-to-one laptop program and agreed to the program as a pilot project to inform the transition in regard to student and teacher perceptions to technology integration. The school had not previously engaged in an online delivered unit of work or implemented integrated technology across a year level cohort of English students.

Digital games feature prominently in discussions concerning the ways museums might reimagine themselves—and best serve their audiences—in an increasingly digital age. Questions are increasingly asked about the opportunities various games might provide to foster historical imagination, and, in this process, contribute to the curation, construction and dissemination of knowledge: goals central to the work of modern museums. This paper reports on the experiences and perceptions of three groups of year 9 students (aged 14-15) as they engaged with one purpose built digital game—called The Voyage— at the Australian National Maritime Museum in 2015. The researchers sought students’ feedback on the strengths, weakness and possibilities associated with using games in museum contexts (rather than at home, or at school). In presenting students’ perspectives and their associated recommendations, the paper provides vital end-user input into considerations about how museums might maximize the potential of digital games, to enhance historical awareness and understanding, build links to formal curriculum, and strengthen partnerships between schools and museums.

This thesis explores how academics in higher education experience virtual worlds as pedagogical places. Using the virtual world Second Life™ as a lens, I examine the changing nature of embodiment, pedagogy and place for academics and the significance these changes have for academic identity and practices.

Full Text, Thesis (PhD Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), School of Education and Professional Studies, Arts, Education and Law, This research explores the experiences of children living globally mobile lives. The children live in families where one or more parents are highly skilled professionals and mobility is an ever-present element of their employment. Understandings around the concept of ‘home’ can be wide-ranging for these children. A European International School is the site of the research. The majority of the students in the school are living outside of their ‘birth’ nation and culture, and may therefore be classified as ‘Third Culture Kids’ (Useem, Useem, & Donoghue, 1964). Third Culture Kids (TCKs) are loosely defined as children who do not live in their country of origin, and are foreigners in the countries in which they reside. As such, these children are members of an imaginary ‘third culture’ of those with similar lifestyles (Pollock & Reken, 2009; Useem et al. 1964). A sociocultural-new literacies paradigm provides a generative approach for exploration of the multiple dimensions of these children’s lives in the 21st century. The research compares and contrasts the children’s different forms of play involving digital technologies, including social connectivity facilitated through playful uses of technology. In many regards, for children whose lives are defined by the fact that they continually move away from existing social environments, new technologies have had extraordinary consequences. Computers and the Internet are significant components of most of these children’s out-of-school worlds, and are enjoyed in both private and social environments. The role of technologies in these children’s school lives is also considered. This dissertation particularly focuses on the ways in which identities, online and offline worlds, everyday life and literacies and the worlds of school, interact in the lives of these young people.

Full Text, Thesis (PhD Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), School of Education and Professional Studies, Arts, Education and Law, For more than a century English has been taught in Australian schools, encompassing a range of traditions and practices lived and enacted in classroom communities. English subjects are continually evolving, moving toward a new world of infinite possibilities for human ingenuity. Teachers’ perspectives on their practices are embedded within this dynamic context, and within discourses about the traditions and responsibilities of the English subjects. In contemporary times, however, new demands are made on English and English teachers. With an increased emphasis on ‘communication’, including multimodal forms of text and literacy, the need for young people to be critically literate, and the challenges of twenty first century society and globalization mean that English is expected to fulfill diverse agendas and roles. As the only compulsory subject in most states in Australia, English occupies a significant role, catering to a wide range of students with diverse needs and abilities. The introduction of a revised final two-year English course in Victoria, V.C.E. English, in 2007-2008 brought questions about literature, the composition and purposes of English to the fore. Drawing on interviews with eight teachers of Victorian Certificate of Education (V.C.E.), the study set out to explore the place of Literature in contemporary English curriculum, and the complex values, beliefs and practices that influence teachers’ views.

Full Text, Thesis (PhD Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), School of Education and Professsional Studies, Arts, Education and Law, This research takes a cultural disability studies approach to the history of intellectual disability and examines its ramifications for modern discourses of autism Specifically, J investigate how and why concepts of intellectual disability shift over time in response to social, political, medical, and educational motivations. The nineteenth century was a time of tremendous change in the categorisation of people according to perceptions of intelligence, the consequences of which continue to resonate in the current era and structure how we regard intellectual disability and difference. We now have labels of learning disability and autism spectrum disorder: classifications that previously did not exist. J explore how autistic identity is constructed in the competing discourses of the medical and social models, the poststructuralist approach, and the neurodiversity and autism advocacy approach, and I question the implications of the shifting discourses of autism on the subjectivity of the person with an autism diagnosis.

This thesis highlights the failure of mainstream education to meet the diverse needs of some adolescent students. The interwoveness of identity, engagement and learning are significant, as it discusses the underlying assumptions that operate in many educational institutions, and that serve only a portion of adolescent populations.

Literacy remains one of the central goals 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 Technologies (ICT), has brought about significant changes to traditional forms of literacy. Older, print based forms now take their place alongside a mix of newer multi-modal forms, where a wide range of elements such as image, sound, movement, light, colour and interactivity often supplant the printed word and contribute to the ways in which meaning is made. For young people to be fully literate in the twenty-first century, they need to have clear understandings about the ways in which these forms of literacy combine to persuade, present a point of view, argue a case or win the viewers’ sympathies. They need to know how to use them themselves, and to be aware of the ways in which others use them. They need to understand how digital texts organise and prioritise knowledge and information, and to recognise and be critically informed about the global context in which this occurs. That is, to be effective members of society, students need to become critical and capable users of both print and multimodal literacy, and be able to bring informed and analytic perspectives to bear on all texts, both print and digital, that they encounter in everyday life. This is part of schools’ larger challenge to build robust connections between school and the world beyond, to meet the needs of all students, and to counter problems of alienation and marginalisation, particularly amongst students in the middle years. This means finding ways to be relevant and useful for all students, and to provide them with the skills and knowledge they will need in the ICT-based world of the Twentyfirst century. With respect to literacy education, engagement and technology, we urgently need more information as to how this might be best achieved.

The terms ‘literacy’ and ‘technology’ remain highly contentious within the field of education. What is meant by ‘literacy’ and the methods used to measure it vary quite markedly in educational and historical contexts across the world. Similarly, while there is a shared concern to research the potential impact of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) on patterns of teaching and learning, there are major discrepancies about which aspects and uses of these technologies should be incorporated into formal learning environments and how this can be accomplished. While government policy makers tend to regard ICTs in relation to ideas of ‘smartness’, efficiency, and the ‘knowledge’ (or ‘new’) economy, educators and educational researchers promote them as offering new tools for learning and critical thinking and the development of new literacies and socio-cultural identities. This clearly has ramifications for the ways literacy is taught and conceptualised throughout the years of schooling, K-12. Outside school, meanwhile, students engage with ICTs on another level entirely, as tools for the maintenance of social networks, for leisure, and for learning and participating in the cultures of their peers. Whatever the differences in perspective, it remains the case that a society’s dominant understandings about literacy and technology will have significant implications for the development of school curriculum.