MANAGING PUPILS’ CORE DRIVES TOWARDS AN E-INCLUSIVE AND TRANSFORMATIVE PRIMARY ENGLISH CLASSROOM

Abstract

During the transition to the 21st century, Jacques Delors gave a powerful reminder on how Education “is one of the most powerful tools with which to shape the future or, to use more modest terms, to steer us into the future by taking advantage of constructive trends and trying to avoid pitfalls” (Delors, 1996).

Following this ideal, the current educational scene should be seen as one in which the main focus ought to give students “opportunities that challenge them to solve complex problems, make rational decisions, and present compelling arguments for their solutions to the problems” (Harshbarger, 2016), instead of ensuring that students can prove proficiency on annual assessments as most contemporary public education settings do (Harshbarger, 2016).

Hence, Chou’s Gamification Octalysis Framework becomes a valuable management tool for pupil motivation, engagement, and holistic development (Chou, 2016), aiming at a profile through which knowledge, skills, and mindsets (Ehlers, 2020) are mobilized to answer complex demands (OECD, 2018). Moreover, its core-drives deal with intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that foster desired-actions (Chou, 2016) in the English learning classroom, thus promoting e-inclusive and transformative approaches which are aligned with the Universal Design for Learning (Hersh, 2020).

This study is being developed as part of a PhD project which main objective is to reflect upon the Gamification Pedagogy and how it may affect the teaching and learning of the English language, following an ethnographic and qualitative methodology. Results tend to show that pupils became more productive and engaged towards learning a second language, however, some challenges occurred during our practices.