The Power of Play in Higher Education

Creativity in Tertiary Learning

Alison James, Chrissi Nerantzi, Alison James, Chrissi Nerantzi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783319957807
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This book examines the increasing popularity of creativity and play in tertiary learning, and how it can be harnessed to enhance the student experience at university. While play is often misunderstood as something 'trivial' and associated with early years education, the editors and contributors argue that play contributes to social and human development and relations at a fundamental level. This volume invalidates the commonly held assumption that play is only for children, drawing together numerous case studies from higher education that demonstrate how researchers, students and managers can benefit from play as a means of liberating thought, overturning obstacles and discovering fresh approaches to persistent challenges. This diverse and wide-ranging edited collection unites play theory and practice to address the gulf in research on this fascinating topic. It will be of interest and value to educators, students and scholars of play and creativity, as well as practitioners and academic leaders looking to incorporate play into the curriculum.

© The Author(s) 2019

Alison James and Chrissi Nerantzi (eds.)The Power of Play in Higher Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95780-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Making a Case for the Playful University

Alison James¹

(1)

University of Winchester, Winchester, UK

Alison James

Email: [email protected]

keywords

TheoryFestivalDefinitionsTypesInterpretationsEmotions

End Abstract

California Dreaming

7.30 a.m. Saturday, 16 February 2018. I am on the 24th floor of the luxurious Fairmont Hotel, in their Crown Room, placing brown paper bags on tables more fit for a wedding reception than a workshop. The occasion is the 49th Learning and the Brain Conference, co-hosted with Stanford University, and I have come to talk about play. The huge windows offer a near 360° panorama of the city—its buildings glowing under a fresh morning sun and their outlines imprinted against a flawless blue sky. San Francisco Bay is littered with sailboats and a toy Alcatraz and tiny Golden Gate Bridge are iconic and crisp against the water. I tell myself if no one wants to play this morning, at least they have something fabulous to look at.

7.45 a.m. Slides are up, mikes are checked, and props are ready. I prowl around the space, juggling coffee and nerves. The conference is dedicated to the relationship between neuroscience and learning. While I know where play comes into this, I wonder how many people will want to forego a weekend lie-into think about it?

Concern about participant numbers (or rather the lack thereof) had made planning a hands-on session challenging. First of all, at a time of heightened airport security I was not sure what I could bring from the UK? Were paper clips too sharp? Could Play-Doh® conceal something dangerous? Would sand make me look like a drug smuggler? (I may have been overthinking.) How much stuff should I bring? Enough for 3? 30? I felt a weight of responsibility too; my friend and dear colleague Stephen Brookfield was flying in from Tucson to co-host. What if it was not worth his while? How would we justify sitting in a room with wonderful scenery and some crazy stuff in brown lunch bags from the CVS store, if no one came?

There is a point to this preamble and to my articulation of apprehension. Worrying about who might attend your conference session is magnified when you are involving play. Play divides tertiary educators. Responses can be polarised, with colleagues open, fired up and energised by the prospect of playing, or suspicious, dismissive and uncomfortable. In San Francisco, I was confident teachers from the primary and secondary sectors would understand the importance of play for their age group of learners. However, the people I really wanted to convince were university colleagues, my target context university learning. The words of my host when I had spoken at a major UK university in January 2018 rang in my ears: ‘My job is to educate my students, not entertain them. Can you persuade me why I should bring play into my teaching?’.

The short answer is, of course, that you can educate while entertaining; the longer one is to explore with people where, how and why play might fit in their given context. My goal in the States was to make the case for play in HE by actually playing, by drawing on eminent play theorists and by sharing stories of the ever-increasing engagement with play in HE. And this is what I will do here too, to lay the ground for the explorations and sketches which follow in this collection.

But—briefly—back to San Francisco. You can tell a lot about workshop participants by how they position themselves in rooms and how they relate to the things they find in them. Brown bags, sticks, peas and marshmallows, building bricks, soft items or shiny images can all attract or repel participants. For anyone curious enough to shake the bags that fine Saturday morning, they concealed a mysterious miscellany. They rattled or clicked, or emitted ruffly, soft sounds. Participants gravitated towards them, intrigued or sat as far away as possible. They lifted them, heads cocked at a jaunty enquiring angle (perhaps hoping they were breakfast?). Or left them alone, as they gazed out over the Pacific, perhaps wondering why they were up quite so early and what else they could be doing.

I will now fast-forward 90 minutes and summarise what happened. To my joy, participants arrived well before our start time of 8.15 and they kept on coming. The tables filled up; they lined the sides of the room and stood at the back. About 150 of us explored perceptions and definitions of play through building brick puzzles and responding to the contents of the brown bags. We fed views through the online backdrop of Todaysmeet.​com (a virtual classroom) curated by Stephen, to gather responses and questions throughout the session. Feedback was fantastic, with many participants telling us they felt freed, inspired, energised, cheered, surprised and much more. One or two were honest about not being convinced—finding engaging in playful activity of the kind we had offered ‘silly’. The different kinds of emotions, ideas, responses and convictions about play from this event are ones which I have seen recur in all kinds of educational contexts and conversations. For this reason, the San Francisco workshop summarises and symbolises many of the points which I will explore more fully now.

The Play Times They Are a Changin’

(with apologies to Bob Dylan)

Chrissi and I have already indicated that the tide is turning with regard to play in higher education. Our fellow players in the sector also know this, however there are still important developmental conversations to be had. These are about expanding our conceptions of what play is (and isn’t), learning about how play is already enhancing the university experience and why play it is important, and appreciating the tensions and constraints that can mar our ability to play.

With this in mind, our San Francisco workshop opened with stimuli to prompt a conversation about play, enclosed in those brown paper bags. A scroll of tasks curled and tightly tied with coloured ribbon guided participants through. In pairs or small groups, they investigated textures, drew analogies, created patterns, played guessing games and made meaningful arrangements. They expressed their responses on their paper bags and on luggage labels; these were collated and arrayed on a table, providing an instant and powerful picture of feelings about play. This activity was inspired by UK National Teaching Fellow Giskin Day’s Cupsule Conversation, which she designed to prompt thoughtful and different exchanges. Having experienced her activity, which had been surprisingly powerful and pleasurable, I have since modified it to explore a range of topics, including assessment. The creativity and credit belong to Giskin, however.

404 Einsteins and Forest School

In March 2017, 404 Einsteins walked through the streets of Toronto to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the largest gathering of people dressed as Albert Einstein (Siekierska 2017). Not only were they successful, but they were marking the beginning of the 2017 Next Einstein Competition, an annual event which looks for ‘ideas that make the world a better place’ (Blackwelder 2017). Setting aside the twin goals they wished to achieve (and any financial prize incentive), why else might participants have wanted to dress as Einstein? What must it have felt like? Was it expressly for a purpose, or just for the heck of it? Did it feel like sheer fun? Was there a sense of connection and camaraderie, so often experienced by those who come together in a mass and common experience? I cannot answer these without stepping into the minds of 404 participants, each of whom will have had a different response. This is because experiences of playful activity are personal and subjective.

I can, however, answer such questions after spending the day at Forest School. In April 2018, 12 of us gathered at a woodland dell in the South of England for a meeting of an accreditation network. The sound of such a group suggests we really should have been in a boardroom. Instead, we were wrapped up in our most sensible outdoor clothing, the day bright but damp, with a vestige of March chilling the air. Guided by our expert leaders, we spent the day integrating our formal business with forest activities. We collected water in storm kettles, made fire to boil them for coffee, cooked lunch over a camp fire, foraged for items to create something from nature embodying five steps, made gall ink and wrote on paper with quills. I summarise drastically. All of us agreed it was an incredibly special experience, with the clear sky and tree tops overhead and the feel and the smells of soil and vegetation all around (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Writing with gall ink

Conducting our academic practice in such surroundings had an indefinable and yet powerful impact on us all. It was liberating and exciting and did indeed create subtle bonds between us through a shared and glorious experience. Our leader shared stories of the children whose teachers bring them (weekly) to Forest School and of the positive impact this has on their overall attainment. This raises important questions about the ways and spaces in which we expect learning to occur, and the enduring place of play in both of these.

What Does Play Mean? What Does Play Mean to Us?

Where does the play of imagination come from? When are sounds music? When are patterns and colors art? When are words literature? When is instruction teaching? (Nachmanovitch 1990: 5)

I love this quote for its evocation of the blurriness between boundaries and of how difficult it can be to say something is precisely this, but not that. So it is with our definitions of play.

Play is such a small word, and yet it is wide open to application and interpretation. We can see this by scanning and selecting definitions from a range of sources. Better still, ask a large room full of people what play means to them. Both they and the dictionaries may come up with something familiar or succinct; play as the opposite of work; voluntary and intrinsically driven activity without serious purpose. (It is the same with the adjective ‘ludic’ (from the Latin ‘ludere’ to play) which some of our contributors adopt; definitions vary from pertaining to play, to more specific references to liveliness, fun or spontaneity.)

A quick browser search adds a little to this baseline; ‘physical or mental leisure activity that is undertaken purely for enjoyment or amusement and has no other objective’ (Playtherapy.​org.​uk). These basic meanings are often the ones with which people content themselves, however there are many more to be found.

Use play as a verb and the possibilities are multiplied; playing can involve performance, roles, deception and trickery. Combine play with another linguistic component—such as ‘wordplay’ and this conjures verbal dexterity, wit, mental agility, linguistic duelling and experimentation (all complex qualities). Horseplay suggests something else—the rough and tumble of energetic youth, physicality, liveliness, contact, abandon (no equine required).

In Deep Play, the author and naturalist Diane Ackerman defines ideas rather beautifully as ‘the playful reverberations of the mind’ (2000: 4). The notion is poetic and has an innocence or neutrality to it, whereas Brian Sutton-Smith (1997) argued that play has darker or ambivalent connotations in terms of human behaviour.

The words ‘play’ and ‘games’ are also often used interchangeably, and yet they are not synonyms. Games are largely structured activities with rules and conventions, while play can be any permutation of freedom and openness, as well as having its own particular facets (think theatre or make believe, as well as fantasy conventions). Games are one of the more popular and accepted play forms, and the creation of the term gamification (akin to what Helen Sword describes playfully as Zombie Nouns) seems to validate the practice further. The popularity of gamification in the university is clearly evidenced by our Gamers and Puzzlers.

Similarly, play and creativity are often conflated, and yet they are not identical in meaning; play is not necessarily creative, nor is creativity always playful. They have much in common, being experiences all can enjoy, being stimulating, energising and freeing; ones which can take you beyond yourself. For us as editors where they sometimes differ is that play can be about exploring possibilities through games and simulation, and about experience and behaviour, while creativity is about the making of newness in the form of an outcome. However, even these differentiations are too crude, as you will see in the contributions which follow, and the subtle differences between the two well worth exploring in future research.

How and Why Do We Play?

The American psychologist Peter Gray, writing for Psychology Today (n.d.), brings in the dimension of how—rather than what—we play by asserting that ‘the characteristics of play all have to do with motivation and mental attitude, not with the overt form of the behavior’. This also relates to playfulness, or the manner in which we engage in an activity, rather than the activity itself. If we turn to renowned play writers and theoreticians however, we discover deeper social and existential facets of our subject.

The Dutch historian Johann Huizinga asserted that play is fundamental to the successful navigation of human existence. He argued that all play is meaningful and a cultural phenomenon; although it is actually pre-cultural, animals play without having to learn how from humans (Huizinga 1938).

In The Play Ethic, Pat Kane, author and one half of the 1980s singing duo Hue and Cry, offers a manifesto for play as a driver for radical social change. He argues that play is not ‘merely the stuff of recreation or leisure, idleness or diversion’ (2004: 6), but defines it across his publications and social media as ‘taking reality lightly’. This is not to trivialise it, but rather to echo reality in a more sardonic form—perhaps as a way of making peace with life’s difficulties, oddities and threats. We only have to think of the gallows humour of medics, the material of observational comedians, the sarcasm of frustrated commuters or the acid in...