Papers by Alexander Bacalja
Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 2026
Australian literacy education policy has undergone rapid transformation in recent years, shifting... more Australian literacy education policy has undergone rapid transformation in recent years, shifting from decentralised, teacher-led approaches to centralised, mandated regimes narrowly defined by "science of reading" frameworks. This shift reflects broader global policy trends in education, yet it has not emerged organically from pedagogical innovation. Rather, it reflects the rise of new policy actors (philanthropic organisations, consultancy firms, think tanks, and edu-businesses) whose participation in education governance mirrors trends documented across other neoliberal states. Understanding these policy shifts requires moving beyond traditional analyses of policy texts to examine the networks of influence through which new actors reshape literacy policy discourse. This paper employs social network analysis (SNA) to examine how policy networks and boundary spanners shape Australian literacy education policy. With SNA as its primary methodological approach, providing a tool for visualising and analysing complex relationships within policy assemblages, the research design involves gathering information on public statements, organisational affiliations, and collaborative projects related to literacy education in Australia. This data is used to create visual representations of the relationships between various actors in the network governance structure, including government agencies, educational institutions, non-profit organisations, and influential individuals. The paper contends that understanding Australian literacy policy requires attending to the "labour of assembling" the policy network itself, the mundane work of connectivity, relationship-building, and discourse circulation through which particular literacy approaches become naturalised as inevitable and evidence-based. By making visible the relational work of the network, the analysis reveals how policy is constructed rather than discovered, and exposing the ideological commitments and selective interpretation of research that underpin these policy shifts. This work demonstrates the importance of network analysis for understanding how global policy paradigms circulate and become embedded within national education systems.
Literacy Learning: the Middle Years, 2026
In "A technologically textured… other-worldliness"?, Natalie Bellis explores the intersection of ... more In "A technologically textured… other-worldliness"?, Natalie Bellis explores the intersection of GenAI and classroom writing. Bellis is interested in what might be lost as teachers and students increasingly report turning to GenAI to facilitate teaching and learning in the subject typically referred to as subject-English. Bellis makes her stance clear from the start: "I argue that engagement with GenAI platforms, in and around our classrooms should be accompanied by careful scrutiny and/ or resistance".
One of Bellis' participants, a secondary school English teacher, uses the concept of affordances to capture what GenAI might offer the writing classroom. Bellis tells us, "Kate's sense of excitement was palpable as she reflected on experimenting with the platform and its affordances with her students." Kate's use of the term affordance is similar to how many people speak about the possibilities of digital technology in education (including my own earlier work on digital games). The premise is simple: a specific digital technology has been designed in such a way that it allows, encourages, and nudges users to particular, usually positive, outcomes. However, a digression into the evolution of shopping trolleys might suggest another way of thinking about the possibilities of GenAI platforms.
Gaming in a postdigital world, 2026
This chapter develops a concept of postdigital gaming as a sensibility for understanding contempo... more This chapter develops a concept of postdigital gaming as a sensibility for understanding contemporary gaming practices. The authors outline a set of theoretical moves that aim to reorient longstanding scholarly assumptions about games and gaming practices, particularly in the context of education: from games-as-objects to games-as-relations, from causal determinism to distributed agency, and from technological solutionism to situated critical practice. These moves are an effort to reckon with the algorithmic infrastructures, commercial logics, and sociotechnical entanglements that govern today's gaming experiences, aspects that dominant approaches in educational research have struggled to account for. The authors argue that gaming practices are fundamentally and irreducibly relational, that they cohere through a variety of contingent arrangements of actors, both human and non-human, that exceed attempts to isolate them, to measure them. The chapter ends with a discussion of postdigital gaming's implications for research and practice, with an emphasis on approaches that work to make legible gaming's opacities and embeddedness in broader platform ecologies.
English Teaching Practice & Critique, 2026
Purpose-This paper argues for the integration of critical digital game literacies (CDGLs) into En... more Purpose-This paper argues for the integration of critical digital game literacies (CDGLs) into English and literacy education. This study aims to move beyond simplistic good-bad dichotomies surrounding digital games in education by exploring how different theoretical perspectives can inform a more nuanced approach to digital games and school learning.
Design/methodology/approach-Drawing on Han's theorisation of the productive relationship between narrative and theory, this paper uses a conceptual analysis approach, synthesising ideas from four key theoretical areas: educational studies, postdigital studies, literacy studies and cultural studies. By critically examining how concepts from these disciplines construct different narratives about digital games and learning, this paper develops an integrated theoretical framework for CDGLs education.
Findings-Analysis reveals a shared commitment across perspectives: CDGLs cannot be reduced to instrumental competencies but must be understood as complex, socially situated, ideologically laden practices. Educational studies insist that why we teach with games must precede how; postdigital studies demands attention to entangled ecologies in which games operate, resisting technological determinism; literacy studies grounds CDGLs within genealogies of meaning-making across modes and media; and cultural studies refuses essentialist readings, instead foregrounding the productive instability of meaning and young people's active negotiation of cultural texts.
Originality/value-This paper offers a novel interdisciplinary framework for conceptualising CDGLs education. By bringing together diverse theoretical perspectives, it provides a comprehensive understanding of how digital games can be critically engaged within English and literacy education, contributing to the evolving discourse on digital literacy practices and schooling.
Reading Research Quarterly, 2026
This article examines the concept of digital reading through a postdigital lens, challenging dete... more This article examines the concept of digital reading through a postdigital lens, challenging deterministic views of technology's impact on reading practices. It explores the contingent nature of all digital reading through the concept of postdigital literacy ecologies, attending to the complex interplay between digital and analogue reading. Drawing on a case study of an Australian high school student's experiences with a game-centered English curriculum, the paper demonstrates how digital reading practices within one local configuration were constituted intra-actively with multiple phenomena, including curriculum and schooling, materiality, multisensory embodiment, and game design. The analysis reveals the blurring of boundaries between old and new literacy practices, the entanglement of analogue and digital elements, and the simultaneous rupture and continuity in reading experiences. The paper argues that understanding digital reading through the framework of postdigital literacy ecologies challenges both techno-optimist and techno-alarmist narratives associated with digital reading, revealing the complex, situated nature of contemporary reading practices. It calls for a reconsideration of how we conceptualize, teach, and assess reading in the postdigital age, emphasizing the need for pedagogies that acknowledge the entangled nature of digital reading. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 2006
The system of norms that constitutes neoliberal imaginaries has permeated almost every aspect of ... more The system of norms that constitutes neoliberal imaginaries has permeated almost every aspect of everyday life. While New Zealand has long embraced neoliberal educational policies, reshaping its approach to English teaching in a manner similar to other Australasian and Western nations, the country now stands on the brink of an intensified neoliberal shift. Over the past two years, the English teaching profession in New Zealand has observed a gradual increase in neoliberal rhetoric, signalling an acceleration of these principles. As New Zealand's English teaching sector prepares for this amplified neoliberal influence, it becomes crucial to examine the experiences of other Anglophone nations that have already been led by similar imaginaries. This paper employs collective writing methodologies to explore techniques, strategies and rationalities that are shaping English teaching across the Asia Pacific region. We find that techniques, strategies and rationalities associated with English teaching reform produce a self-discipling subject (school-English), and what Foucault refers to as self-disciplining subjects (teachers and students), characterised by accountability, transparency, standardisation, and competition. However, the forces acting upon English teachers are not consistent across contexts, with some experiencing an intensification of control and others finding space for relaxing. More research is needed to trace the new incarnations and invocations of neoliberal discourses across borders, and between new policy actors, to address how policy ideas that are shaping school-English travel, move, and are (re)appropriated. This work is fundamental if we are to fully engage with neoliberalism's transformative effects and affects on English teaching.
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2026
Digital games have become ubiquitous educational technologies, deployed across a range of context... more Digital games have become ubiquitous educational technologies, deployed across a range of contexts for the purposes of supporting diverse teaching and learning goals. This deployment has been underpinned by instructivist and constructivist learning discourses that employ imaginary visions that are overly deterministic and which risk inadequately preparing learners for critical engagement. This paper argues for conceptualising the relationship between digital games and learning in terms of more critical imagined digital futures. It explores a case study of game-centred school learning, whereby two Australian middle-schools replaced a print-centric curriculum with one focussing on digital games. Informed by postdigital theory, analysis of the entanglements that emerged from extensive teacher interviews reveals how critical perspectives can support breaking away from totalising theories and knowledge claims regarding digital game learning, while offering productive conceptual tools, such as critical digital game literacies, for imagining learning differently.
English in Education, 2026
This paper situates itself within debates surrounding the impact of neoliberalism on English educ... more This paper situates itself within debates surrounding the impact of neoliberalism on English education and proposes postdigital English as an alternative narrative. Drawing on Han’s assertion that narratives are crucial for creating meaning and fostering social cohesion, this paper argues that a postdigital narrative for English education produces new forms of perception which counter the limitations imposed by neoliberal frameworks. The tension between neoliberal constraints and emerging postdigital possibilities are explored through the analysis of one experienced English teacher’s negotiation of the digital/English nexus. Findings suggest that while secondary English teachers are constrained by current neoliberal structures, reimagining English differently is possible through postdigital frameworks. This reimagining embraces the entanglement of human and technological elements, recognises the blurred boundaries between digital and analogue, and fosters critical engagement with the socio-material complexities of contemporary communication.
Playing with digital game pedagogies
English classrooms represent an important source of language learning for a diversity of students... more English classrooms represent an important source of language learning for a diversity of students. This work has always been supported by texts which mediate classroom teaching that engages with identity, subjectivity and the cultivation of dispositions, attitudes and values (Beavis 2018). In recent times, debates about what constitutes a text, worthy of study, have manifest into curricula and practice that increasingly includes digital games as forms of literature through which the objectives of English teaching can be achieved. This has raised questions about how teachers employ pedagogy to support all learners facing these new ways of working with texts. This chapter explores two ways that digital games might be used as texts in the English classroom. The first is a case study using the game Never Alone (Upper One Games 2014), alongside traditional texts in an Australian English language arts classroom. The game’s story, themes, characters and textual features were aligned with curriculum demands in order to support student understanding regarding how different text types construct indigenous stories. Data were collected which related to the design and implementation of the unit of work, which was taught to almost three hundred students across two campuses, teacher interviews, curriculum materials, student focus groups and student work samples
English in Aotearoa, 2025
Postdigital Science and Education, 2024
This article is a collective response to the 2003 iteration of James Paul Gee's What Video Games ... more This article is a collective response to the 2003 iteration of James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Gee's book, a foundational text for those working in game studies, literacy studies, and education, identified 36 principles of 'good learning' which he argued were built into the design of good games, and which have since been used to unsettle the landscape of formal education. This article brings together 21 short theoretical and empirical contributions which centre postdigital perspectives to re-engage with, and extend, the arguments first raised by Gee regarding the relationship between videogames and learning. Organised into five groups, these contributions suggest that concepts and attitudes associated with the postdigital offer new thinking tools for challenging grand narrative claims about the educative potential of technologies while also providing rich analytical frames for revisiting Gee's claims in terms of postdigital videogame literacies.
Postdigital Science and Education, 2024
Discourses that establish the potential learning benefits of digital games for schooling too ofte... more Discourses that establish the potential learning benefits of digital games for schooling too often focus on learning as a product of relations between student and gameplay, adopting overly deterministic positions that have long been associated with digital technologies and education. This paper draws on ideas from postdigitalism to problematise such narrow conceptualisations of digital game-based learning (DGBL). The analysis of one Australian school's experience of incorporating digital games into their senior English curriculum provides a break from broad generations and allows a focus on the web of relations within which digital games exist when deployed in formal school contexts. An analytical framework which draws on three ideas emerging from postdigital studies is utilized to explore relations of power through which digital games interact as they are played and studied in schools. This analysis suggests that unitary logics about learning and digital games are insufficient and highlights the importance of engaging with the complexity, continuity and contingency in DGBL contexts to combat the hyperbole that surrounds digital games and education. Postdigital attention on actual instances of digital game deployment reveals the fragility of all knowledge claims about these technologies, contributing to a more critical discourse regarding their potential to impact school learning.
Ludic Language Pedagogy, 2024
Background: Digital games as technologies for teaching and learning are finding their way into sc... more Background: Digital games as technologies for teaching and learning are finding their way into schools with increasing frequency, raising questions about how teachers plan for their use. Aim: This paper utilises curriculum inquiry to explore the experiences of teachers designing curricula that centre digital games for play and study. Methods: We employ a memory work methodology to analyse four English teachers' reflections, emphasizing the value of reflecting on everyday actions to understand the complexity of professional lives and the situated nature of knowledge. Results: Our paper reveals that designing and implementing digital game-centred curricula is complex. The analysis of themes related to engaging with students' lifeworlds, planning for skills and knowledge, the challenges of play, and issues of access and equity, suggest use of technology for school learning is always inseparable from other phenomena, such as teaching methods, purposes, values and contexts. Conclusion: Those engaged in the design of game-centred curricula are in a constant state of negotiation which neither starts nor ends with the production of material artefacts. TWEET SYNOPSIS Designing digital game-centred curricula is complex work. We explore four teachers' experiences to examine the tensions that arise when digital games and school learning are brought together.
Language Arts, 2023
In this column, the author makes the case for using digital
game stories in the language arts cl... more In this column, the author makes the case for using digital
game stories in the language arts classroom, juxtaposing
exemplary games with more traditional texts.
In 2003, James Paul Gee released What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, a... more In 2003, James Paul Gee released What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, a book that would become foundational for those working in game studies, literacy studies, and education. In the original version, Gee identified 36 principles of 'good learning' which he argued were built into the design of good games. Through an investigation of these principles, and their manifestation in popular games, Gee inspired a generation of scholars and teachers across fields to think and work with video games in ways that conceptualised their value in ways that moved beyond engagement. As a result of drawing comparisons between the presence of these principles in games and their absence in many school contexts, Gee positioned video games as educational technologies. This positioning has been used by scholars and edtech entrepreneurs alike to make a wide range of claims about the so-called learning 'affordances' of video games, and their potential to unsettle the landscape of formal education. The emergence of the postdigital as a concept for theorizing our relationships with digital technologies draws attention to the ways that such technologies shape the core of education (Knox 2019). The postdigital holds-to-account the broad cultural understandings that the term 'digital' has come to represent (Jandrić et al. 2019), rejecting techno-positivism innovation narratives (Cramer 2015). The tendency for postdigital perspectives to challenge grand narrative claims about the educative potential of digital technologies provides rich analytical frames for revisiting Gee's claims about the transformative learning benefits associated with playing, making, and studying videogames. If we are moving into a critical post-videogaming phase (Koutsogiannis 2022), what might this mean for the generation of questions that produce new insights into Gee's seminal work? How might shifts from video game literacies to postdigital literacies (Apperley 2016), and the associated entanglements between technologies and social practices, lead us to rethink Gee's 36 principles? In this call we invite you to submit 500-word responses which consider postdigital reconfigurations of Gee's (2003) What videogames have to teach us about learning and literacy.
English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 2023
Purpose: This paper explores the characteristics of playful literacies in case study research exa... more Purpose: This paper explores the characteristics of playful literacies in case study research examining digital games in secondary English classrooms. It analyses how educators utilise play as a resource for meaning-making and the impacts of play on student learning. Design/methodology/approach: The authors used a keyword search of relevant academic databases to identity articles within specified search parameters. This was followed by bibliographic branching to identify additional articles. Following the identification of 30 articles, two rounds of open coding were utilised to identify themes for analysis. Findings: The literature revealed five types of playful pedagogical practices: singleplayer gameplay, turn-taking gameplay, multiplayer play, play-as-design, and little or no gameplay. Discussion of these findings suggest that classroom play was a highly social activity across case studies. Furthermore, boundaries between types of play and their contributions to learning were blurred and often disrupted normative approaches to curriculum and teaching. Originality: Given the novelty of replacing traditional texts with digital games in English classrooms, this study represents an important moment to pause and review the literature to date on a particular, understudied aspect of digital games in English curricula: their playfulness. This is especially important given the innovative ways in which digital play can shift thinking about meaning-making and narrative, two historically dominant concerns within the discipline of English.
Ludic Language Pedagogy, 2023
This is the first paper in a three-part series which examines digital game literacies and school ... more This is the first paper in a three-part series which examines digital game literacies and school learning. This paper (Part 1) argues that conceptualizing digital game literacies within sociocultural approaches to literacy provides educators with ways of thinking about digital games and learning that move beyond the hype often associated with new digital technologies in education. I begin by exploring how sociocultural approaches to literacy provide a useful foundation for rethinking how digital games are deployed within the social and cultural contexts of schools. I then analyze evolving definitions of digital game literacies, before demonstrating why bridging these practices with school learning does not always produce the outcomes teachers and researchers might wish for. This paper offers a foundation for moving beyond discourses of digital game based learning that privilege the medium and instead focuses more closely on what teachers and students do with these technologies within the disciplinary constraints of formal schooling.
Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 2022
This paper explores how changing digital literacy practices in educational contexts require that ... more This paper explores how changing digital literacy practices in educational contexts require that we continually revisit conceptualisations of digital literacy education. We begin by analysing the positions taken by stakeholders who contribute to digital literacy discourses in Australia, exploring how competing interests produce effects which manifest in ways that differently consecrate social and cultural practice in the digital age. We advocate the need for pedagogic frameworks that support digital literacy education. Existing approaches tend to privilege the operationalisation of digital technology. By contrast, teaching is needed which focusses on meaning-making and creating. However, the 'datafication of everyday life' (Barassi, 2018, p.170) has included extraordinary interventions into schooling that have significant implications for teachers and students. We argue that preparing young people for digital citizenship must include a focus on critical digital literacies that are responsive to contemporary digital forces (e.g. platformatisation, artificial intelligence, edu-apps, algorithms) as well as those digital technologies that are yet to make their way into formal schooling.
Bringing Critical Media Literacy into ELA Classrooms - Volume 2, 2022
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Papers by Alexander Bacalja
One of Bellis' participants, a secondary school English teacher, uses the concept of affordances to capture what GenAI might offer the writing classroom. Bellis tells us, "Kate's sense of excitement was palpable as she reflected on experimenting with the platform and its affordances with her students." Kate's use of the term affordance is similar to how many people speak about the possibilities of digital technology in education (including my own earlier work on digital games). The premise is simple: a specific digital technology has been designed in such a way that it allows, encourages, and nudges users to particular, usually positive, outcomes. However, a digression into the evolution of shopping trolleys might suggest another way of thinking about the possibilities of GenAI platforms.
Design/methodology/approach-Drawing on Han's theorisation of the productive relationship between narrative and theory, this paper uses a conceptual analysis approach, synthesising ideas from four key theoretical areas: educational studies, postdigital studies, literacy studies and cultural studies. By critically examining how concepts from these disciplines construct different narratives about digital games and learning, this paper develops an integrated theoretical framework for CDGLs education.
Findings-Analysis reveals a shared commitment across perspectives: CDGLs cannot be reduced to instrumental competencies but must be understood as complex, socially situated, ideologically laden practices. Educational studies insist that why we teach with games must precede how; postdigital studies demands attention to entangled ecologies in which games operate, resisting technological determinism; literacy studies grounds CDGLs within genealogies of meaning-making across modes and media; and cultural studies refuses essentialist readings, instead foregrounding the productive instability of meaning and young people's active negotiation of cultural texts.
Originality/value-This paper offers a novel interdisciplinary framework for conceptualising CDGLs education. By bringing together diverse theoretical perspectives, it provides a comprehensive understanding of how digital games can be critically engaged within English and literacy education, contributing to the evolving discourse on digital literacy practices and schooling.
game stories in the language arts classroom, juxtaposing
exemplary games with more traditional texts.