These are books I’ve published on a variety of subjects, including media literacy, the media arts, digital production and children’s play. In some cases there are downloadable chapters.
PLAYING THE ARCHIVE: from the Opies to the Digital playground (2025)
This edited collection comes from a major research project on children’s play and the work of the Opies. It offers new forms of access to and new understandings of the Opie archive at the Bodleian Libraries, as well as new ethnographic studies of playground games. The image links to the publisher’s page, with further details.
LITERATURE, VIDEOGAMES AND LEARNING (2021)
This is an extended study of the relationship between (English) literature and videogames, with examples drawn from a range of research projects. The book includes chapters on: ludo-literary aesthetics and narrative; literature, games and multimodality; ludo-literary literacies; game adaptations of children’s literature; and game design projects based on Beowulf and Macbeth.
NEW DOWNLOAD
DOWNLOAD a pre-publication version of the whole book (which has the advantage of colour figures!).
IN DEFENCE OF THE MEDIA ARTS: SCREEN EDUCATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (2016)
This is a published version of my professorial inaugural lecture, proposing six rationales for media arts work in schools.
Amazon link for Book or Kindle version.
Curriculum and Assessment in English 3-11/11-19 (2017)
These are two books published by Routledge, for which John Richmond is largely responsible. They are co-authored with myself, Peter Dougill, Angela Goddard, Mike Raleigh and Peter Traves, and provide both a critique of the current National Curriculum for English and a detailed set of proposed alternatives. My section is on Media in English.
The document you can download here is an earlier, longer version in a precursor set of booklets published by UKLA with Owen Education, edited by John Richmond. Available from the UKLA.
Burn 2015 – media education 3-19
This booklet was translated into Japanese in 2019 by Professor Kimi Ishida and Professor Kaori Okuizumi.
CHILDREN’S GAMES IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE (edited with Chris Richards, 2014)
An outcome of the AHRC-funded project Children’s Playground Games and Songs in the Age of New Media. This book contains chapters covering all aspects of the study, including the digital Opie collection we created at the British Library, and the BL’s Playtimes website.
CHILDREN, MEDIA AND PLAYGROUND CULTURES, with Rebekah Willett, Jackie Marsh, Chris Richards, and Julia Bishop (2013)
This is an outcome of two ethnographic studies of school playgrounds, part of the AHRC-funded project Children’s Playground Games and Songs in the Age of New Media.
MAKING NEW MEDIA (2009)
This book explores examples of young people’s production of new media: film, animation, digital games and machinima.
The book has been translated into Japanese by a group of scholars in Tokyo, Kyoto and Yokohama, led by Professor Kaori Okuizumi, to whom I’m extremely grateful. It’s published by Kuroshio Press, Tokyo.
MEDIA TEACHING: LANGUAGE, AUDIENCE AND PRODUCTION (2008, edited with Cal Durrant)
A collection of essays representing perspectives on media education from Australia and the UK.
MEDIA LITERACY IN SCHOOLS, with James Durran (2007)
The first chapter proposes a cultural-semiotic model of media literacy. The other chapters exemplify aspects of this model through case studies of media education work at Parkside Community College in Cambridge, where we both once worked.
MLS_C01 (the first chapter)
COMPUTER GAMES: TEXT, NARRATIVE, PLAY, with Diane Carr, David Buckingham and Gareth Schott (2006)
This book emerged from our research project on role-playing games.
ANALYSING MEDIA TEXTS, with David Parker (2003)
This is a student introduction to principles of multimodal analysis as applied to media texts. The sample texts are film, videogame and website, with some original contributions to multimodality theory in respect of these three media.
Burn 2003 Analysing Media Texts ch 1
Andrew Burn 