Textual Entanglements: Interactive Fiction in the Secondary School English Classroom
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Holdstock, Samuel. 2025. Textual Entanglements: Interactive Fiction in the Secondary School English Classroom. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]
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Abstract or Description
My research investigates a contradiction between my values and my practice as an English teacher; while I recognise the importance of students engaging actively and creatively with texts they are reading, I found myself teaching lessons that positioned my students as passengers rather than meaning-makers. In this thesis, I report upon how I used one form of writing to respond to this contradiction: Interactive Fiction (IF).
In this thesis, IF refers to a non-linear form of hypertext fiction that is read using an electronic device. Employing a post-humanist onto-epistemology and a material-dialogic conceptualisation of classroom reading, this study examines the possibilities for IF as a resource in the secondary school English classroom, exploring what the writing of IF can reveal about my positionality, how IF can be written for use in the English classroom, the affordances of IF as a classroom resource, and the influence of IF upon classroom talk. As such, it considers the ways that my students and I became, through our engagement with IF, part of an entangled set of relations emerging amongst ourselves, IF and a range of organic and inorganic factors.
In order to identify some of IF’s affordances, I have incorporated into this action research study a variety of qualitative methods, such as lesson recording, interviews, autoethnography and the creative writing of IF. I show that IF can be used to conduct self-reconnaissance, using IF to produce an account of the ways in which my own privilege, values and memories, along with various policies and practices, shape my uneasy positionality as a teacher. I report upon how my approach to writing IF has developed and show that IF can be written in a way that enables students to discuss, make and comment upon language choices. I show that working with IF affected my teaching, finding that IF can make teaching and learning enjoyable, but also that it can help to make space for the voices of students during lessons. Finally, I show that IF can be used to help students practise inferential prediction, evaluation and argumentation, as well to support metalinguistic understanding and to facilitate metalinguistic forms of classroom talk.
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Item Type: |
Thesis (Doctoral) |
| Identification Number (DOI): |
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| Keywords: |
Education, Interactive Fiction, English, Secondary School, Pedagogy |
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| Date: |
30 June 2025 |
| Item ID: |
39177 |
| Date Deposited: |
11 Jul 2025 14:41 |
| Last Modified: |
11 Jul 2025 14:49 |
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URI: |
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