2025 UniSA Teaching and Learning Breakfast Series

Using games to promote engaged, inclusive learning: how ludic inquiry can help us navigate challenges of university education today

PANEL PRESENTER(s):

• Amelia Walker, University of South Australia
• Cat Kutay, Charles Darwin University
• Samantha Faulkner, Independent Scholar and Creative Writer
• Stef Rozitis, University of South Australia
• Axel-Nathaniel Rose, University of New South Wales
• Daniel Pitman, University of Adelaide
• Stephen Whittington, University of Adelaide
  

ABSTRACT: How can games and playful learning help us navigate current challenges of university learning? This panel-style presentation offers fresh perspectives and insights from seven contributors to the new book Ludic Inquiries into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education: How Games Play Us (Walker, Grimmett & Black, Eds, Routledge, 2024). We begin with a general introduction to ludic inquiry as a set of methods for pedagogy and research wherein playing games offers key processes of problem posing and knowledge making. This includes discussion of how ludic inquiry relates to and differs from established modes of game-based learning. We then offer examples of ludic inquiry’s forms and benefits via chapter-specific presentations illustrating ways in which educators can use ludic inquiry to enhance inclusivity and engagement. Enhancing inclusivity entails questions of how educators may promote improved learning equity amongst students for whom major socio-economic and systemic injustices present significant barriers to education. Related to this, learning engagement currently demands strategies for working in asynchronous online environments where economically-squeezed students scramble to fit study around paid work commitments – a scenario that impacts all students in our present economic climate, but more dramatically affects those already subject to social inequities. Our panellists collectively represent perspectives of scholarly and lived expertise across areas of Indigenous Knowledges, working class first-in-family students’ needs, LGBTQIA+ allyship, and pedagogical applications of new and emerging technologies. Each presentation will be followed by Q&A. We hope to ignite ongoing dialogues about unfolding possibilities for ludic inquiry to address changing needs in higher education today.

BIO(s):

• Amelia Walker lives on Kaurna Country and lectures at the University of South Australia. She is co-editor of Ludic Inquiries into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education: How Games Play Us (Walker, Grimmett & Black, Eds, Routledge, 2024) and author of Reading and Writing for Change (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
• Samantha Faulkner is a Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal woman. She is the author of Life Blong Ali Drummond: A Life in the Torres Strait, and editor of Pamle: Torres Strait Islanders in Canberra (2018) and Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia. Her poetry and short stories are published nationally and internationally.
• Cat Kutay is descended from seafarers of Aboriginal and Celtic origin. Cat is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Science and Technology at Charles Darwin University. She works with Aboriginal communities for online language learning, story sharing and data analysis as a way for Aboriginal culture and knowledge to be acknowledged and integrated into Australian engineering approaches.
• Axel-Nathaniel Rose is an author, editor, researcher, and orator, based at UNSW Sydney. His research crosses fan studies, queer studies, book history, and literary studies. His work, critical and creative, has been published in Transformative Works and Cultures, Axon, Ludic Inquiries, Unsweetened Literary Journal, Tharunka, and Aesthetic. His plays have been performed by NUTS.
• Stef Rozitis is finishing up their Masters thesis as University of South Australia on Kaurna Country. They are passionate about social justice, gender, early childhood teaching and the social and political contexts that surround and produce schooling. They enjoy creative writing as well as “serious” writing for research.
• Daniel Pitman lectures in Sonic Arts at the Elder Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide. Dan’s research incorporates assimilating immersive and environmental technologies into music making. Dan’s most recent AI piece for terpsichora, composed with Iran Sanadzadeh, debuted internationally in Hamburg and later in Boston for the Tenor Conference in 2023.
• Stephen Whittington is a composer, performer, writer and music critic. He is Head of Sonic Arts at the Elder Conservatorium of Music where he teaches composition and music theory and supervises Masters and PhD students. As a pianist he has an international reputation as an interpreter of the music of contemporary composers.

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