A Playvolution…Are You In?

by Lisa Forbes

I look at the picture of students listening to a lecture and I think: This is education? Why do we continue to drone on and on at students like this? Where’s the joy? Where’s the fun? Where’s the excitement? I’m sure you could find some other photos with some more engaged students but this picture isn’t all that unrealistic to what a typical classroom in higher education looks like. Even for faculty who are more flexible, creative, and innovative, I’d argue they still get caught up in the status quo sometimes. I know I do. I think that’s the trap of status quos, they are extremely hard to escape. The whole system is built around it, all the players continually feed into it, and it becomes almost unnoticeable and unrecognizable. It just becomes the norm, the standard. Like a fish swimming in water, it becomes hard to know anything but the water. 

As much as passive lecture-based approaches are the norm in many classrooms, I’d venture to guess that many students are bored, uninspired, and disengaged. I came across a blog (as far as I can tell, a serious blog) called 45+ Things to Do in a Boring Lecture. As I read through these ideas, I started wondering: So, this is how we have come to know education. That learning is boring. Lectures are boring. It’s just what happens in education so just need to survive it and slug through until you can graduate and never have to learn again. Yuck! So…you need to research things to do in order to survive a boring lecture.

I’m starting to wonder if students and or faculty even believe it can be something entirely different. I am personally trying to escape the all-encompassing ‘water’ of academia and lecture-based learning to explore how else it could be. I realize that there’s more than one way to be an effective and engaging educator but what I believe in is playful pedagogy. Last year I designed a study of my students’ experiences of learning with a playful pedagogy and the data has me even more convinced. Below is a quote from one of my student participants and I think it hits the nail on the head about how students might feel:

“Everything about grad school feels non-fun-oriented: extensive program handbooks, performative quizzes, unnecessarily complex assignments, formidable grading and attendance policies, all of which seem designed to discipline rather than educate; loads and loads of reading which is never discussed or applied in class, and so it feels removed from usefulness. Play provided an uplifting break from the seriousness of all this. My experience has shown that the value of play in learning is not to be underestimated. The incorporation of a little levity and a laugh has been life-affirming in general, but has also felt useful in creating a spaciousness for learning that is palpable, and palpably absent in other classes where the focus is more on performative quizzes and lengthy PowerPoint presentations. I feel better primed to learn when it’s not quite so rigid a class environment. The spaciousness has been invaluable.”

What have we done to education? 

I know there are some exceptional faculty doing amazing things in their teaching. But even with some faculty being different, innovative, playful, or flexible, I’d argue that the overall script of academia aligns with this student’s experience. This student’s words pretty well reflect the core of our educational system and I think that’s a problem. 

If we take a step back from our everyday lived reality and dare to step out of the water, can we consider education differently? Can it be fun, joyful, energizing, and novel? Can we do things in a way that earns our students attention and motivation instead of expecting it or demanding it simply because they are paying to earn their degrees? Personally, I dream of a playful culture where the process of learning and earning a degree isn’t regarded as a burden and a chore. Let’s call it a playvolution. You in?