6.1 Learning and/as Play: Playfulness as Human-Centered Pedagogical Practice

Erin Vearncombe, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy, University of Toronto Mississauga, Jennifer Ross, Woodsworth College, Transitional Year Programme, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Digital Humanities and Writing

"“Play” and “work” appear as opposites: work is comprised of rigorous, accomplishment-oriented activity whereas play is unstructured activity for its own sake, a voluntary behaviour directed at personal enjoyment. Scholarship on play in education, however, shifts our perspective such that neat divisions between work and play are constructively blurred. Koops and Taggart, for example, view play “as activities and dispositions that allow for trying out ideas without immediate judgment or evaluation, increasing enjoyment or flow, and fostering creativity in a safe environment” (2011). A safe environment - and one that fosters human flourishing - is one that values failure, guess and check, and experimentation in problem-solving.

Re-learning to play in higher education empowers educators to address the challenges shaping teaching and learning in higher education today, including anxiety, depression, barriers to learning, structural inequities, classroom absence, and burnout—for both learners and ourselves. Play effectively facilitates the development of core academic behaviours: curiosity, experimentation, failure, resilience, creativity, adaptive problem-solving, etc. In this session, we invite participants to connect with both research and each other as we experiment with playfulness as a human-centered pedagogical practice. First, we engage recent scholarship on play and learning in higher education. We then go digital as we model a unit on knowledge production, preservation and censorship in the contemporary age structured around the Uncensored Library, a component of the popular game Minecraft. Movement between play, discussion and collaborative design work will facilitate a puckish and critically engaged learning period emphasizing the pedagogical value of curiosity, culminating in the design of small teaching innovations that participants can take away to transform their own teaching into sites for human flourishing.