Reimagining Boredom in Classrooms through Digital Game Spaces: Sociomaterial Perspectives

by Noreen Dunnett

Overview

This book challenges common understandings of boredom and disengagement in classrooms, taking a relational approach to boredom which looks beyond the usual distinctions between in-school and out-of-school practices.

The book explores how a sociomaterial perspective can provide an alternative analysis of boredom as performative, and as a phenomenon assembled in space and time rather than as a psychological attribute of the individual student. This perspective explores the affective experience of learning and how it is created in the classroom through assemblages of people, technology, objects and environment and the differing relations within them. Drawing on empirical data from a case study which compares formal learning and digital gaming practices in a group of secondary schools in England, the book suggests that by altering the affordances and constraints available in learning situations, we can prevent boredom and disengagement emerging in the classroom.

This innovative book proposes that the mobility and dynamism of game spaces offer us new ways to re-imagine engagement in learning and will be of relevance to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of teaching and learning, digital gaming, educational philosophy and educational technology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032345383
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/30/2025
Series:	Routledge Research in Education
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Noreen Dunnett is a research associate in Digital Education, Centre for Research in Digital Education, and an associate tutor and dissertation supervisor on Master of Science in Digital Education, University of Edinburgh, UK.

Table of Contents

1. The problem with boredom 

2. Re-imagining boredom as a schooling phenomenon

3. Becoming an assemblage ethnographer: a personal account

4. The assembling of boredom through spatio-temporal practices

5. Practices, participation and agency: feedback and modelling

6. Creating affective atmospheres in classrooms and digital gaming

7. Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

"Many books and articles exist that focus on theorising and measuring student engagement, so it is refreshing to see an alternative perspective in Noreen Dunnett’s (2024) Reimagining Boredom in Classrooms through Digital Game Spaces. Dunnett (2024) provides an engaging and original contribution both to the fields of education and video game studies. She argues that video games and the practices that surround them offer creative, dynamic, and agile possibilities for learning. Studying these possibilities provides the potential to disrupt traditional educational practices of teaching and learning and enable the creation of pedagogies that counter the boredom that is inherent in our current approaches to schooling. The methodological contribution of the assemblage ethnography in action provides a clear example of how in-depth qualitative research can be carried out in rigorous and reflective ways...it is crucial that we keep looking at alternative (and better) ways to make school teaching more inclusive and engaging, and this book does just that. By adding to the voices that problematise modern education and look for alternatives to current practice, it makes an excellent—and disruptive—contribution."

Nicola Whitton, Northumbria University, UK

From the Publisher