Casey, Hastie & Jump SES.pdf (171.26 kB)
Examining student-designed games through Suits’ theory of games
journal contribution
posted on 2016-10-07, 09:01 authored by Ashley CaseyAshley Casey, Peter Hastie, Steve JumpThis paper documents how a unit of student-designed games can create a more meaningful version of physical education (PE) for disengaged students, a version that enhances the educational legitimacy of the subject matter by affording it worth in and of itself rather than being justified for other, extrinsic or instrumental reasons. Furthermore, it seeks to develop new knowledge relating to the conduct of game instruction within PE, by using Suits’ theory of games. Drawing on Suits’ theory, we develop a conceptual model that is intended to represent the hierarchical processes that occur in gameplay through student-designed games. This model is then tested via examination of the experiences of a cohort of teachers and their year 10 students from a mixed secondary school in the greater London area. From our discussions with the students, it is argued that the key focus of the games that these students were used to playing was the need to ‘play the game well’. By contrast, we suggest that it is possible to provide more meaningful experiences to students if a more philosophically driven and less efficiency-driven approach to games is taken, following Suits’ lead more closely. By exploring the loop between and around lusory means, lusory goals and constitutive rules (the aspects of Suits’ theory that have been shown to represent student-designed games), students engage with a more meaningful games experience than simply playing the game well. This ‘new’ approach to games may offer counterbalance to the ideological tendencies now emphasized in countries and contexts that celebrate instrumental outcomes of performative PE and sport rather than affording worth in and of itself to the curriculum’s subject matter.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Sport, Education and SocietyVolume
21Issue
8Pages
1230 - 1248Citation
CASEY, A., HASTIE, P. and JUMP, S., 2016. Examining student-designed games through Suits’ theory of games. Sport, Education and Society, 21 (8), pp. 1230-1248.Publisher
© Taylor & FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2015-01-02Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Sport, Education and Society on 02/01/2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13573322.2014.994174.ISSN
1357-3322eISSN
1470-1243Publisher version
Language
- en