Reimagining Boredom in Classrooms through Digital Game Spaces

Book excerpt: This book challenges common understandings of boredom and disengagement in classrooms, taking a relational approach to boredom which looks beyond the usual distinctions between in-school and out-of-school practices. The book explores how a sociomaterial perspective can provide an alternative analysis of boredom as performative, and as a phenomenon assembled in space and time rather than as a psychological attribute of the individual student. This perspective explores the affective experience of learning and how it is created in the classroom through assemblages of people, technology, objects and environment and the differing relations within them. Drawing on empirical data from a case study which compares formal learning and digital gaming practices in a group of secondary schools in England, the book suggests that by altering the affordances and constraints available in learning situations we can prevent boredom and disengagement emerging in the classroom. This innovative book proposes that the mobility and dynamism of game spaces offer us new ways to re-imagine engagement in learning and will be of relevance to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of teaching and learning, digital gaming, educational philosophy and educational technology.