Date: Friday 26th April 2019

Time: 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM

Location: Geoffrey Manton LT3

Tickets: £15 registration (£10 Postgraduates), includes refreshments and lunch. Available here -  https://buyonline.mmu.ac.uk/short-courses/flame/symposium/symposium-transmedia-theory-and-practice-in-language-learning-and-teaching 

FLAME Research Group invites academics, teachers and professionals to this symposium on Transmedia and Language Teaching.

This one-day symposium addresses research in the areas of Transmedia, Digital Media, Languages and Pedagogy. We have invited five leading academics to present their research in 40-minute presentations followed by 15-20 minutes of Q&A. With the support of the AHRC OWRI Cross-Language Dynamics.

Draft Schedule:

09:30 10:00 Registration

10:00 10:15 Welcome Speech

10:15 11:15 Dr Paul Wake and Dr Sam Illingworth (Manchester Metropolitan University) Talking a good game: Using games to teach English as a foreign language

11:25 12:25 Liz Cable (Leeds Trinity University) The Locked Box and other stories: using escape games for learning and assessment

12:30 1:30 Lunch

1:30 2:30 Professor Nicola Whitton (Durham University) The Great Escape: Learning through Collaborative Game Design

2:40 3:40 Paul Spence (King’s College London) Bridges and chasms: on the relationship between (modern foreign) languages and the digital humanities

3:45 Close

Speakers’ bio notes:

Professor Nicola Whitton is Director of the Durham Centre for Academic Development and Professor of Education at Durham University. Her research focuses on play in adulthood, in particular games and learning in the context of Higher Education, and the potential of play in teaching, research, and academic practice. He most recent projects have focused on the potential of escape room design for learning. She is chair of the Association for Learning Technology Special Interest Group on Playful Learning, and co-chair of the Playful Learning conference.
Paul Spence is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at King's College London and has an educational background in Spanish & Spanish American studies. In the past he has led digital research on a number of projects involving digital editing, user-generated content, innovative visualisation and digital publishing. He co-developed the multi-platform publishing framework xMod (now Kiln http://kcl-ddh.github.io/kiln/), which has been used on over 50 projects. His research currently focuses on digitally-mediated knowledge creation, global perspectives on digital scholarship and interactions between modern languages and digital culture. He leads the 'Digital Mediations' strand on the Language Acts and World-making project (https://languageacts.org/digital-mediations/).
Liz Cable is Senior Lecturer in Digital Narratives and Transmedia Production at Leeds Trinity University. She is a PhD candidate investigating the role of immersive games in learning.
Dr Paul Wake is Reader in English Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University and a co-director of the university’s Games Research Network. His current research and teaching is in Transmedia Theory and Practice in Language Learning and Teaching the area of games (analogue and digital) and play, and he has worked on a number of projects using games in education.
Dr Sam Illingworth is Senior Lecturer in Science Communication at Manchester Metropolitan University where he uses poetry and games to develop dialogue between science and society. He is a co-director of the Games Research Network and chief executive editor of the journal Geoscience Communication. You can find out more about Sam and his research via his website: www.samillingworth.com 

Organisers: Dr Carmen Herrero, Dr Daniel Escandell Montiel, Ms Marta F Suarez

Film, Languages and Media in Education (FLAME) is a pioneering research group at Manchester Metropolitan University established in 2013 and dedicated to the development of research and knowledge exchange activity in the areas of Pedagogy, Languages, Film and Media. Each member of the FLAME Research Group is committed to progressing language pedagogy by carrying out active research into multimodal approaches to teaching and effective use of films, media, visual literacies and audio-visual material in the classroom. Research demonstrates how such approaches are beneficial to both learner and teacher and should be integrated into language teaching curriculum and educational contexts around the world.