Thammasat University students interested in education, sociology, innovation, psychology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 11 December Zoom webinar conference on Playful Learning in Higher Education: What, Why, How.

The event, on Wednesday, 11 December 2024 at 10am Bangkok time, is presented by the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and College of Arts and Sciences, Japan.

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of playful higher education.

Students are invited to register at this link:

https://u-tokyo-ac-jp.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZErc-CvqDMoGdx6aer7C9dCzlZsl5UmA_Dc#/registration

The event announcement states:

Abstract

In recent years, research on playful learning has extended beyond its traditional areas of focus on early childhood and K-12 education to other demographics, including higher education and adulthood. Drawing on academic literature and personal experience, this talk invites us to (i) reflect upon what we might mean by playful learning in higher education; (ii) consider why playfulness might be valuable to higher education, and (iii) explore how play might be practically incorporated into higher education pedagogy and practice. It concludes by highlighting considerations and challenges that may hinder the prospects for playful learning in higher education and raises the question of how these might be overcome.

Speaker Bio

Vinay Kumar is a sociologist by training and currently a faculty developer at the Centre for Teaching, Learning & Pedagogy (CTLP) at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

In 2017, an article, Playful learning in higher education: developing a signature pedagogy was published in the International Journal of Play.

Its abstract:

Increased focus on quantifiable performance and assessment in higher education is creating a learning culture characterized by fear of failing, avoidance of risk, and extrinsic goal-oriented behaviours. In this article, we explore possibilities of a more playful approach to teaching and learning in higher education through the metaphor of the ‘magic circle’. This approach stimulates intrinsic motivation and educational drive, creates safe spaces for academic experimentation and exploration, and promotes reflective risk-taking, ideation and participation in education. We present a model of playful learning, drawing on notions of signature pedagogies, field literature, and two qualitative studies on learner conceptions of enjoyment and reasons for disengagement. We highlight the potential of this approach to invite a different mind-set and environment, providing a formative space in which failure is not only encouraged, but a necessary part of the learning paradigm.

The article began:

Throughout much of Europe and beyond, there is a growing commercialisation of higher education, with a growing focus on metrics to measure the performance of students, academics, and institutions . The sector is increasingly competitive as universities embrace neoliberal ideas of marketization and the associated discourses of efficiency and effectiveness.  This emergence of ‘the corporate university’ or ‘the knowledge factory’ promotes teaching to the test, reproduction of information, criteria-based assessment, and clear quantifiable outcomes. Rather than supporting the values accentuated as driving higher-order thinking and doing or the virtues at the base of moral practice of academics.

Instead, these values and virtues are stigmatised as risky, unproductive, and too fuzzy. Learner engagement and satisfaction have become key performance indicators (e.g. the US National Survey of Student Engagement and the UK Student Satisfaction Survey), despite evidence that students and staff do not share understandings of the value of such metrics. This pressure on meeting the demands of external metrics inevitably affects institutional cultures, academic practices, and learner experiences, and the increasingly performative culture of higher education creates an assessment-driven environment focused on goaloriented behaviours, characterized by avoidance of risk and fear of failure. 

To counter this, we have recently witnessed an emergence of so-called gameful approaches in higher education, including the use of educational games, and gamification techniques. These are used to support student engagement, but too often focus primarily on outcomes, competition, and extrinsic rewards, and thus, in effect, echoing the performative culture of the sector. In this article we argue that while gameful approaches may be a useful technique to enhance engagement, it is the deeper playful underpinning and provision of opportunities to learn from failure that are at the heart of playful learning in higher education. 

Drawing on key literature in the field, and two research studies, we develop the notion of a signature pedagogy of playful learning in higher education to consider the possibilities of an educational system that recognises the importance of openness, curiosity, risk-taking and failure in learning. As a theoretical lens, we use the metaphor of the ‘magic circle’, coupled with the ‘lusory attitude’ that is essential for meaningful activity within a playful space.

Finally, we highlight the potential of this signature pedagogy of playful learning to invite a different mind-set and environment, providing a more formative pedagogical space in which open-endedness, virtuous academic 2 citizenship, and ideational learning are central.

Its Conclusion:

We have presented an emerging model for a signature pedagogy for playful learning in higher education. We intend this as the basis for discussion, dialogue and reflection rather than a finished product or check-list. We recognise that the two studies described are small scale and represent limited samples of students, but we believe that this analysis is a useful starting point for describing and analysing playful learning as a signature pedagogy. 

An inherent paradox of this model is that for many students to view learning as valuable then it must be valued by the system (assessed), yet it is simultaneously this assessment that makes learning stressful and undermines the creation of a safe and 13 comfortable environment. In the current higher education climate there will always be a tension between the extrinsic drivers of assessment and the intrinsic desire to learn. 

We recognise also that there may be limitations to playful approaches. It is important to remember that not all adults play, and not all are intrinsically playful: some chose not to play, while others are excluded from play. Play is a privilege for those with the time, inclination, appreciation, confidence, social capital, and ability to engage and further research is also needed to explore the implications of the exclusivity of play. 

Despite these shortcomings, we believe that playful learning provides a new paradigm for understanding higher education pedagogy in an increasingly performative risk-aversive environment. It is an approach that gives learners and teachers freedom to be playful, freedom to make choices, and freedom towards the world. It is beyond profane seriousness – in the act of being playful, we enrich profane reality by a layer of sacred seriousness.

In playful education students not only have to remember and recall information or understand and apply theories – it is even more so the emergence of knowledge through failing, risking, experimenting, wondering, constructing, and critically reflecting. Such approaches carry the potential of circumventing some of the present looming problems within education in general, and disappointments in relation to the promise of gameful and playful approaches in education in specificity.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)