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Enlivening a Young Adult Novel on Instagram: Fostering Reading for Pleasure and Interest in Local History
Abstract
This chapter presents action research based on the transformational design of a young adult novel (Υ.Α.) into an alternate reality game (ARG) on Instagram and its implementation as an extra-curricular activity. The Y.A. novel, The Deer of Rhodes, by K. Stoforos, was selected according to specific criteria, among which of major importance was the smooth integration of local history elements in it. The action research explored the relationship between students' participation in the activity and their attitudes toward literature, their acquisition of certain historical knowledge, and the strengthening of their computational thinking. The assessment of the action research was based on the monitoring of the students' engagement during the implementation, the recording of their performance in embedded tests, and the statistical analysis of their responses in the questionnaire that was handed out after the implementation.Introduction
In the postmodern era the boundaries between high and low culture have become blurred. The osmosis and intersection of the fields of culture, art and technology have created new hybrid forms, which question the whole conceptual edifice of modernism, with its institutions and established practices, including literature itself, the concept of aesthetic prestige and its criteria (Moula, 2013). The new digital reality influences radically and recasts the narrative theory (Moula 2010). Through multimodal expression, the traditional form and reception of literature changes and a new digital fiction emerges (Moula, 2019c) where a variety of innovative projects combine and enrich the written textual form with digital sources (Giannikopoulou & Fokiali, 2011). The narrative emancipates itself from its once dominant literary conventions and the accompanying criticism, whose role was to safeguard and guarantee the canonical reception. The various media with their own cultural, semiotic and technological dimensions mark the developments in the field of narrative to varying degrees (Bal & Van Boheemen, 2009: xx).
The theoretical starting point of the transformation of the novel into an ARG was the commonly accepted assumption in the literary field of Humanities, that narrative, once monopolized by the literary writing, has been liberated from the literary conventions and has evolved into a dominant cultural attitude. What’s more, the underlying philosophy of the transformation of the literary text into an ARG was the theory of multiliteracies, which legitimizes the intervention in a pre-existing project/artifact (designed) so as to create new derivative products in multimodal terms (redesigned). Design involves representation, reframing (integration into a new environment), recombination and hybridization, transforming the available resources, while the redesigned product never simply copies what is designed, but interprets it or sheds light on different aspects of it.
The fundamental distinction between literary texts and literature itself (Ingarden, 1973) served furthermore as the theoretical cornerstone of our experiment. On the one hand, literary texts are autonomous entities with material or intangible dimensions and on the other, literature is a heteronomous process and exists only activated through the consciousness of the reader, who receives it and animates it. At the same time, digital environments consist a challenge to our educational approaches in general and to literary reading in particular. Given, on the one hand that the preoccupation with the digital universe is causally linked to the decline of literary reading (Levine et al. 2007) and the indifference to the historical past, and on the other hand, young people's literary literacy rates are declining dramatically, this research aimed to explore the possibilities of harnessing digital space's advantages to achieve a positive attitude toward literature and history as well. The whole project aspired to cultivate through a playful - entertaining engagement of young people with literature, a more favorable response to literature (Thompson & McIlnay, 2019) and secondarily to history.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Transmedia Narrative: The narrative that takes place across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies. The concept was introduced by Henri Jenkins in his seminal work Convergence Culture. In transmedia narratives all media contribute to extend, expand, or enrich the initial narrative.
Transformational Design: The transformation of the available meaning resources, by designing something new and using the old materials in relation to each other to create patterns of meaning in various contexts. This procedure results in the Redesigned (According to the multiliteracies theory of the New London Group, 2000).
Cultural Activator: Any cultural artifact, happening or activity that provokes the active engagement of the recipients. Jenkins uses the term to define the aesthetic goals of convergence culture projects that serve first and foremost as “cultural attractors” by bringing people together, and then, as “cultural activators” by providing opportunities for participation.
Computational Thinking: A set of problem-solving methods and practices that involve confronting problems and finding solutions in ways that a computer would also execute. The characteristics that define computational thinking are decomposition (taking a complex problem and breaking it down into a series of small, more manageable problems), pattern recognition/ data representation (detecting arrangements of characteristics or data that yield information about a given system or data set), generalization/abstraction, (formulating general concepts from specific instances by abstracting common properties), and algorithms (a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations or for accomplishing a task).
Alternate Reality Games: A relatively new category of storytelling, pervasive, transmedial, and playful, developed in online interactive environments but also utilizing real-world communication methods. As hybrids between story and game, they achieve immersion and encourage participatory storytelling, problem-solving, and action by the reader-player. The fact that they blur the boundaries between imagination and reality and are diffused in the real and virtual world, contributes to the enhancement of the learning experience.
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