The Educational Value of Entertainment: Public and Private Adolescents’ Lives

• In Event: Valuing Entertainment

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the educational value of entertainment by building bridges between young people and everyday entertainment scenarios, both in the classroom and out of it, when commercial video games and other digital tools mediate their practices. It is organized around two questions: 1) How new media, present in entertainment and school contexts, have brought along a new communication scenario that frames the relationship between public and private life and in which they break down the barriers between real and virtual worlds, and 2) How the voices of teenagers in entertainment and school contexts become the mirror of their public and private spheres and expresses the process of identity construction. Adopting an ethnographical and action research point of view, we explore adolescents’ conversations, entries and comments on blogs and the multimedia productions that were generated at workshops designed for building bridges between inside and outside entertainment contexts.


Pilar Lacasa is a Professor of Communication and Education as well as the Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Alcalá, Spain. Her current research focuses on how commercial videogames can be utilised as educational tools. She is highly interested in the intersections between new media, children and communication.

Sara Cortés is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Education at the University of Alcalá, Spain. Her primary research interests are concerned with the process of identity construction in relation to children and adolescents playing video games. She is also highly interested in discovering and promoting the creation of new educational spaces where new technologies become literary practices.

Authors

• Pilar Lacasa, University of Alcala

• Sara Cortes, U of Alcala