Playful Learning

Events and Activities to Engage Adults

Nicola Whitton, Alex Moseley, Nicola Whitton, Alex Moseley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351021845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Offering an innovative and dynamic approach to adult learning, Playful Learning explores the potential of play in adulthood with the goal of helping educators, corporate trainers and event designers incorporate play-based activities for adults into both educational and work settings.

Through a comprehensive overview of the value of play in adulthood, this book responds to the growing popularity of playful events for adults in academic and business settings designed to promote higher levels of engagement. Drawing on the authors' own decades of experience at the forefront of the field, this helpful reference incorporates strategies and techniques for bringing play into any learning design. Examples and case studies of successful playful design at conferences, training events, and in higher education illustrate what effective playful event design looks like in practice.

With a multi-sector appeal that spans business, education and entertainment while bringing together practice and theory in an accessible manner, Playful Learning is a must-have resource for researchers, practitioners, managers and administrators alike.

Part I

Introduction

1  Introducing Playful Learning Events

Alex Moseley and Nicola Whitton

Think back to the last business, community or academic event you attended. Did you get the usual joining instructions, with bus routes and hotels? Did you arrive at a registration desk and pick up a badge bearing your name? Did you sip mediocre coffee while looking for familiar faces and avoiding others? Did you sit and listen to a talk or watch a presentation? Did you repeat these several times, before it was time to leave; and were you given an evaluation sheet to complete or that you forgot to complete?

The authors contributing to this book have done all of that, many times over. They have co-organised events that include some of those very activities: being, as most people are, constrained by venues, time, money and convention.

Introduction

Six years ago we were both travelling back from a conference, bemoaning the standard, tired format that seemed designed to quash creativity and limit time for discussion and exploration with others. We began to make a list of the things at the heart of this problem: too long to repeat here, but we are sure you could do the same based on your own experiences (start with sponsor presentations and PowerPoint bulleted lists and proceed from there). In a playful twist, we then started a thought experiment to design a conference of opposites: removing the negative aspects and replacing them with contradictory positive ones.

Over the next few years, we had the opportunity to work with many colleagues at various teaching and learning events to introduce some of our new playful principles into established conferences. Many of these colleagues have chapters in this book and share details of some of our successes and some of our failures. We, and our colleagues, learnt a lot from these experiences (particularly from the failures). In 2016, we put all of this knowledge into the design of our own ‘conference of opposites’, Playful Learning, running initially in Manchester for three years, and then moving to Leicester from 2019 for the next three. Who knows where it will end up next?

Designing Playful Experiences

Collectively, we are interested in how play, games and playfulness can benefit adult learning and educational practice. As an introduction, we cover this in detail in Chapter 2, where we focus particularly on the value of playfulness, which we describe as “a state of mind or an attitude; a willingness to accept and embrace the constraints of … any activity, to try something new, to attempt something difficult where success is not guaranteed”. Between us, we have investigated playfulness in adult learning contexts, most often in the context of higher education; but then we turned our thoughts to the wider sphere of learning events for adults in all contexts, from classroom to boardroom, and to those constraints at the root of uninspiring events.

Putting on an international conference is, as some readers will know, not a quick or easy experience; but we had a set of principles to work from, and we had a growing number of colleagues and collaborators who could build on their experiences in developing playful experiences to help us. From the outset, we adopted a playful attitude to organisation and found that we could extend that playfulness to other areas of event management (the catering staff, caretakers, technical support, and so on). Our institutional conference organiser, James Charnock, tells the story of how this intrinsic playfulness affected his own approach to event management in Chapter 3 – and describes the positive elements he now applies to other more traditional events.

James is one of a number of practitioners who have contributed to this book. In several cases, this is the first published article they have written; but they are joined by, and have collaborated with, a number of experienced academic writers. It is this supportive and authentic mix of academic and practical authors that makes this book useful and straightforward for anyone involved in any aspect of event or experience design, management and delivery.

As you flick through the chapters, you will find that this is not a traditional academic book, in the sense that is written in clear and uncomplicated language with a focus on practical advice and is therefore accessible to anyone in a business, community or education setting. However, it is academic in its rigour. All of the chapters are based on years of evidence and critical reflection, drawn from the individual and collective research and practice of the authors in and around teaching and learning events. Crucially, the authors draw on that evidence base to offer something new and exciting in learning event design and delivery.

The book is divided into six parts. The first comprises this introduction. The second contains the two chapters described earlier and focusses on the design of playful experiences. The final chapter in Part 2, by Rosie Jones and Alex Moseley, considers design from the audience perspective: carrying warning notes about assuming all audiences are the same by reflecting on the application of similar playful approaches across two different conferences. They suggest design based on the collective outcomes (and desired behaviours) of both audience and organisers.

Creating Play Spaces

Playful design provides a good base for developing more creative and engaging events, but ideally, playfulness should flow across an event to the delivery itself to create playful learning spaces, and this is the focus of Part 3. In traditional events, we are used to the idea of the ‘icebreaker’: an activity to warm up an audience and get them working with the speaker or with each other. Liz Cable has been using activities like this in her own teaching and training for many years, and in Chapter 5 she shares some of her more playful ‘interludes’ to introduce playfulness into events, encourage collaboration and create a group ethic and to energise events through timely interventions.

Sooner or later many learning events culminate in a plenary presentation or two or break into workshops or seminars. Perhaps the most traditional parts of any event, such activities fit into standard forms that have been used for decades (in some cases, such as the plenary lecture, for centuries), and as such these may be the most difficult into which to introduce playfulness. Andrew Walsh, in Chapter 6, considers what sort of invitations might allow attendees and presenters alike to give themselves ‘permission to play’ in such circumstances. Once permitted, he uses his long experience as a playful trainer to suggest ways that different events (from a single teaching session to a multi-day event), and different activity types (including construction toys and the recent phenomenon of escape rooms), can lead to engaging, creative sessions.

Emily Shields is an experienced conference organiser and has been secretary to the largest UK academic libraries and information literacy conference (LILAC) for many years. We invited her to join the Playful Learning Committee, and she reflects (in Chapter 7) on how to interface playfulness in a committee for creativity, with the more serious side of working with venues, volunteers and programme management as the event runs.

Engaging Participants

At the heart of learning events, are the people who take part in them. The fourth part of this book considers different ways of engaging participants at events. There are an increasing number of game forms that break down the traditional barrier between ‘in the game’ and ‘not in the game’ (the much-debated ‘magic circle of play’ first suggested by Huizinga, 1955). Collectively known as pervasive or immersive games (Montola, Stenros, & Waern, 2009), such games or experiences spill out of expected spaces and interface with other spaces that non-players might inhabit. There are events that fit closely in this genre: seminars in public spaces such as libraries or museums; rural- or city-based training activities; arts events that are free-to-all; street theatre or performance; and so on. In Chapter 8, Giskin Day describes her teaching activities that create immersive experiences in central London and see her students solving mysteries across a number of public museums (while carrying balloons). Giskin talks about how her players, the public, the spaces and the puzzles bring everything together to make a highly immersive experience – and how she has dealt with problems and issues that threaten to break that immersion.

Learning events, particularly longer or larger versions, rarely stand alone as self-contained entities. In many cases there is either a requirement, or a wish, to engage with groups external to the main event: project partners, community groups, businesses, other organisations and even the general public. David Wooley is Deputy Headteacher at Cheadle Hulme High School in Manchester and worked with us over three years to integrate conference-based activities with research and development work for his sixth form pupils, culminating in the pupils designing and running a set of challenges for conference attendees throughout the event. In Chapter 9 David discusses the different challenges involved in interfacing a working school with a research conference and describes how playfulness played an important role in building confidence and agency in himself and his pupils.

The most involved example of an event is a multi-day conference: in which any of the activities and design methods described so far might play a part in the greater whole. Katie Piatt brings these elements together in Chapter 10 to draw on her own extensive practice of designing engaging whole-conference playful experiences, comparing and contrasting approaches between formal and informal events and providing practical advice for those wanting to tackle a conference-type event themselves.

Playful Practice

In the penultimate part of the book, we focus on some of the core features of playful events – large-scale lectures, use of technology and tools and evaluation, and consider how these established practices can be made playful. Jones and Moseley return to the topic of engaging activities in Chapter 11 to look in particular at the specialist form of the plenary lecture and how the tightly-constrained elements of this traditional format can lend themselves to playful disruption and building confidence in playing with the format.

Digital technology is pervasive in much event delivery, sometimes causing conflict or confusion where these do not interface well (such as a bespoke social network enforced by an event, that interferes with attendees’ own choice of existing networks). It can also enhance the participants’ experiences through better connectivity, socialisation, visual fidelity, and information finding. Katie Piatt tackles the technology issue in Chapter 12. She uses her experience as a leading technologist in higher education to ask first why you might use technology and then how digital approaches and non-digital tools can help to deliver challenge, collaboration and creativity.

Evaluation, on the other hand, is rarely liked by attendees (unless they have something extreme to report in complaint or praise) and is often poorly designed: meaning that the main purpose of the evaluation, to feed back into the design of future events, is hampered by poor response rates or low-value data. Mark Langan, in Chapter 13, looks at event evaluation: how do we know that an event has worked as intended, and what can we learn for next time? He considers various forms of evaluation, and how they offer different constraints and opportunities for a playful lens, to enable richer and more useful feedback for event organisers: moving on from the tired and ubiquitous ‘smile sheet’ or questionnaire.

The book finishes with Part 6, the conclusion, which draws on some of the key themes that have emerged throughout the chapters and considers what the future holds for playful learning practice.

Conclusion

As we mentioned previously, this is a practical book, based on real evidence from extensive practice. This approach flows through the chapters but is also augmented by the inclusion of 36 case studies, which you will find as boxed text throughout the book. Each case study describes a playful event, activity or approach, and reflects on lessons learned. Given the wide range, you will hopefully be able to find at least a handful of case studies to inspire your own learning event – regardless of topic or form.

The parts, chapters and case studies allow you to choose your own path through this book. You might have an urgent need to design a particular event and might jump straight to the most relevant chapter; you might be looking for inspiration, in which case a flick through the case studies might suffice. You might be interested in playfulness as an ethos, in which case you might begin at the beginning and explore its many forms in the context of event design.

Above all, we hope that you will be inspired to try a small change next time you train, teach, organise or run an event: to introduce playfulness into the design or delivery and see where your creativity can take you, your organising team and your learners.

Part II

Designing Playful Experiences

2 Play and Learning in Adulthood

Nicola Whitton and Alex Moseley

Introduction

Play is fundamental to human existence. It is integral to child development and learning and valuable throughout the whole of life (Bateson & Martin, 2013). Play can be a powerful force to inform, engage and influence attitudes and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Case Studies
• Acknowledgements
• Contributor Biographies
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Designing Playful Experiences
• PART III Creating Playful Spaces
• PART IV Engaging People Playfully
• PART V Playful Practice
• PART VI Conclusion
• References
• Index