Call number: LD2668 .T4 1934 B42

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Improvisational dramatic role-play activities are used in classrooms to encourage children to explore the feelings of the characters in a story. Roleplay exercises can give a story personal significance to each child, and an insight and understanding of the characters which is reflected in stories written afterwards. The thesis describes the development of a virtual environment designed for similar dramatic role-play exercises. The thesis then investigates its effectiveness as a preparation activity for writing stories. It examines the effects the virtual role-play environment has on the characterisation in children’s imaginative writing. It also investigates the social interactions which children engage in and the moral decisions they make during the role-play; and the motivational effects of the virtual roleplay environment. The virtual role-play environment is based on a commercial computer game. Two children and one role-play leader interact with each other in a perceptually realistic virtual world. Each role-player controls an avatar in order to move around this graphical world, and improvise by sending and receiving typed messages. The high quality graphics, sounds and music contribute to the users’ feelings of perceptual presence while the communication between role-players promotes feelings of social presence. The role-players’ emotional engagement with the other characters and the conflict within the adventure encourages them to experience self presence. The virtual role-play environment was evaluated in a field study with sixty children aged between ten and twelve years. The characterisation in stories written after using the virtual role-play environment was compared to the characterisation in stories written under normal classroom circumstances. The stories were compared using a new, fine-grained analysis scheme for assessing children’s writing. The main result is that the stories written after the virtual role-play contained more dialogue and more indications of relationships between the characters than normal classroom stories. Analysis of the typed communication exchanged between the role-players during the game shows that the role-players formed relationships with the other characters. They also made judgements about the characters’ personalities and to a lesser extent expressed emotional involvement during the game. They made moral decisions and could back up their decisions with reasons. Expert evaluation supports the view that the virtual role-play environment is particularly beneficial to children with low literacy standards. Finally, it also benefits children with low literacy motivation and little interest in school work.

This research took place over one academic year in a class of 7 children (6 to 7 years old) with statemented learning and language difficulties. The research aimed to explore the question “What can teachers learn from the stories children tell?” with the class teacher having the dual role of teacher and researcher. The research had two foci: the developmental evaluation of a particular pedagogical approach and an open-ended enquiry into what could be learned through the analysis of the stories told by children using a multi-perspective analysis grid. The pedagogical approach was formulated from certain guiding principles: the development of a “pedagogy of listening”, integrated and creative experiences with opportunities for multi-modal representations, the concept of “playful work”, opportunities for therapeutic play within the classroom, and the importance of giving prominence to stories and story-telling. These principles guided the development of a range of story-telling contexts within which the children told stories to the teacher who acted as scribe. The collection of 145 stories was then analyzed using the grid created for the research. This analysis incorporated an assessment of the language and story-telling skills of the children using a range of methods and an interpretation of the social and emotional meanings conveyed in the stories told. An assessment of the stories revealed that the children had made better than expected progress in their development of expressive language, but the meaning of their stories was to be found in different analyses than those used to assess language development. Teachers could learn much from the stories that the children told, but only if they interpreted the stories from a wide range of perspectives. The pedagogical approach was deemed sufficiently effective for the teacher/researcher to continue developing her practice under its guiding principles.

These sketches and stories are the result of moods, daydreams, and experiences. The collection progresses from those intimate stories controlled by personal experience to the last two works which try to crystallize a mood or experience in a medium without the device of first person. "Grandpa," "Great-Grandpa," and "Weedgod" are sketches which describe the boundary between what things are and what things seem to be. "Aunt Mary," "Hospital," and "Eggy Cooter" are short stories presenting situations in which the reader can determine this boundary line himself.

No description available.

No description available.