Andrew Burn (professor)

Andrew Burn (born 1954) is an English professor and media theorist. He is best known for his work in the fields of media arts education, multimodality and play, and for the development of the theory of the Kineikonic Mode. He is a professor of English, Drama and Media at the UCL Institute of Education.

Burn is also the director of DARE, a research collaboration with the British Film Institute.

Early life & education

Burn was born in 1954 in Shifnal, England. He attended Harrogate Hill Primary School in Darlington, before moving to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah in Malaysia, while he was still young. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, and went on to study at St John's College, Oxford, winning the Eugene Lee-Hamilton prize for the best Petrarchan sonnet in Oxford and Cambridge in 1975.^[1]

Career

Burn's teaching career started as a secondary school teacher, working for over twenty years in Huntingdon, St. Neots and Cambridge. He served as a member of the Labour Party's ruling administration of Cambridge City council between 1982 and 1987. He was part of the peace initiative to twin the city of Cambridge with Szeged, Hungary.^[1]

As part of the specialization of United Kingdom secondary schools in the late 1990s, Burn played a key role in ensuring his school, Parkside Community College, became the UK's first specialized media arts college. The work lasted roughly a decade, with the college focusing on film, animation and video games. Shortly after this, Burn co-authored a book regarding media literacy in schools, which was published in 2007 by Sage. The book represents key aspects of Burn’s theory and research, in particular how media education can foster cultural, critical and creative work by young people, especially in their production of their own films, animations and videogames, cultural forms which occupy a large part of Burn’s research work.^[2]

In 2003, Burn was the first person to establish and coin the term, Kineikonic Mode. The work had close links to multimodality, studying the overall function of various modes in film, animation and video game. The Kineikonic Mode also had connections with film theory. It has since been expanded to analyse time and space in young people’s media productions, and how these express aspects of identity.^[3]

After working in secondary education, Burn moved into Higher Education, after studying for a Master of Arts degree in Cultural Studies and a PhD in film semiotics at the UCL Institute of Education. He worked as a lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies from 2001, later becoming Professor of English, Media and Drama at the UCL Knowledge Lab.

Burn is also a director of MAGiCAL Projects, an enterprise for developing and marketing game-based tools for education and leisure. Missionmaker is one such example, where games could be created by young people to learn about game culture and design.^[4]

Media Arts Education

In 2012, Burn became a founding member and co-director of the collaborative research initiative between the UCL Institute of Education and the British Film Institute. The DARE collaborative was created as a research partnership focused on digital arts education. It aims to promote conversations between researchers, educators and media arts practitioners.

Projects conducted by DARE include a European study of film education with the British Film Institute;^[5] Playing Shakespeare, which developed a game-authoring tool for Macbeth with Shakespeare’s Globe;^[6] and Playing Beowulf, which developed a similar tool for the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf with the British Library. Burn has also led a major project with the British Library to create a digital archive of research on playground games and their relation to children’s media cultures.^[7] This archive, at the British Library, includes the sound collection of Iona and Peter Opie, making it a repository of international importance. Burn was awarded the 2016 Opie Prize of the American Folklore Society for the book of the project.^[7]

Kineikonic Mode

The Kineikonic Mode was developed from the idea of multimodality, a theory of the way in which different forms of communication work together.^[8][9] The rise in technology during the 20th century meant that many historic modes such were revisited in the context of digital cultures and production practices. The study of the moving image, an important cultural form in modern society, is addressed by the Kineikonic Mode.^[10]

Burn established the theory of the Kineikonic Mode in 2003 with David Parker.^[11] It explores the way that informal digital video production can construct, represent or dramatize the identities of young filmmakers. The term is roughly translated to "moving image" when taken from Greek. It provides a way to study how speech, music, dramatic action are orchestrated by the grammars of filming and editing to create meaning for makers and viewers.^[12]

The theory can be applied to a number of cultural forms, including film, video, video game and animation.^[13] The concept of "mode" is derived from multimodal theory.^[14] By studying each mode individually and together, analysts can understand how the meaning of a text is constructed.^[15][16]

Bibliography

• Analysing Media Texts, with David Parker (2003)^[17]
• Computer Games: Text, Narrative, Play, with Diane Carr, David Buckingham and Gareth Schott (2006)
• Media Literacy in Schools, with James Durran (2007)^[18]
• Media Teaching: Language, Audience and Production (2008)
• Making New Media (2009)^[19]
• Children, Media and Playground Cultures, with Rebekah Willett, Jackie Marsh, Chris Richards, and Julia Bishop (2013)
• Children’s Games in the New Media Age (2014)

References