Re-imagining disengagement from learning: the sociomaterial practices of classrooms and digital game spaces
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Date
31/07/2021Author
Dunnett, Noreen Elizabeth
Metadata
Abstract
This thesis challenges the way that disengagement and engagement have
been thought about and defined in the formal learning context of schools.
Rather than regarding schools as static ‘containers’ in which learning takes
place and engagement as represented in the individual behaviour,
achievement and attitude of students, I argue that we should take a
sociomaterial approach to understanding disengagement, treating it as
performative, as a phenomenon assembled in space and time, through the
inter-relations between human and non-human actors such as objects,
technology and the environment.
This relational approach enables us to look beyond binary distinctions
between in-school and out-of-school practices and incorporate digital
gaming as a critical tool to help re-evaluate formal learning environments.
By comparing the different modes of existence enacted through the
practices of gaming and formal learning I have revealed that by valuing
particular performances of engagement over others, schools have stabilised
and entrenched practices which increase the likelihood of boredom and
disengagement emerging.
In two periods of field work during June/July 2016 and Feb – Nov 2017 in
secondary schools in Yorkshire, I used ethnographic methods such as
interviews, observations, photographs, video and audio recordings and field
notes to generate evidence of students’ differing experiences in digital
games to create new understandings of engagement and disengagement
in the classroom.
The thesis makes an original contribution to scholarship by taking a
sociomaterial approach to boredom and engagement, regarding these
phenomena as performative and emergent rather than individual cognitive
processes. By using engagement in digital gaming practices as a critical tool
I have highlighted unhelpful constraints to thinking about educational
practice caused by restrictive, culturally normative notions of what
constitutes an engaging and effective student learning experience. Finally I
have suggested that rather than aiming for predictability and
standardisation in teaching practices teachers should recognise the unique
elements and characteristics of each learning situation and develop
practices based on their own dynamic judgement rather than in response to
policy or the purely instrumental demands of assessment.
This new approach to understanding boredom and disengagement gives
educators potential to: use time and space more flexibly and enable more
agency for students; recognise a wider range of demonstrations of learning
and engagement and work towards less hierarchical relationships between
students and teachers, thus intervening in the production of disengagement.