The serious role of play in educational development, Aybige Yilmaz & Aga M Buckley

The serious role of play in educational development, Aybige Yilmaz & Aga M Buckley

1. The Serious Role of Play
inStaff Development
…andLove?
SEDA Spring Conference 2024
Aga M. Buckley:
Kingston University Master of Social Work Course Lead
Dr Aybige Yilmaz:
Leaning and Teaching Enhancement Centre LTEC

2. Who & Why?
Aybige
Aga
Academic Staff
…Developers with a
twist!
Playful lecturers
Playful academic
developers?

3. Academic Staff
Developers
Migrants stuck in between
management and regular
academicroles (Manathunga, 2007)
Considering Playful Pedagogies
to subvert the impact of the
neoliberal context of Higher
Education (HE), metrics,
marketisation, and performance
culture
Via play, playfulness and love

4. Playful Academic Staff
Development…
Playfulness as a disposition, a
state of mind, an attitude, a way of
engaging with things drawing on
characteristics from play (Sicart
2014)
“A wicked problem” in the serious
business of academic professional
development (Carr et. Al.)

5. Joy in ASD?
“No amount of learning is worth a penny if
it suppresses enjoyment and motivation.”
(Pestalozzi, in Bruhlmeier, 2010)
“Where there is humor, laughter, and
playfulness, there is enjoyment and joy.”
(Hannush 2021, p. 375)
Laughter is a key play behaviour (…) play
and playfulness can have real physiological
benefits for well-being and mental
resilience in HE. (Koeners & Francis 2020)
“Play becomes joy, joy
becomes work, work
becomes play” Johannes Itten

6. Joy in staff
events
Event/ ExamplesTools, techniques & tactics
(Whitton 2018)
Teaching for Active Learning Lego, Dinosaurs, Slime,
Dolls/Making/ Storytelling
Course Leaders' SummitSnakes and Ladders Board
Game for CLs, Solving
Problems/Competition
Course Leaders' SummitMission Impossible game
(props, stationary
soundtrack)/ Role Play &
Problem/ Humour
Developing your FHEA
application
Bespoke Story cubes/ Role
Play & Problem/ Chance

7. Love & Playfulness
“Playfulness, humor, and laughter
are corollaries of the capacity to
love.
Cultivating our capacities to be
playful, to use humor, and to laugh
together strengthens our
attachment bonds.
They stretch the depth and range of
ourability to
love”
(Hannush, 2021)

8. Pedagogy of Love, Pestalozzi’s
learning ‘by heart, (…) putting
love itself into (teaching)
practice”.
Education developing students
Hand & Heart & Soul
Pedagogies of Play and
Pedagogy of Love as the
complementing, transformational
pedagogies

9. Aga Buckley
[email protected]
Aybige Yilmaz
[email protected]

10. References
Bruhlmeier, A. (2010) Head, Heart and Hand: Education in the Spirit of Pestalozzi. Cambridge: Sophia Books
Cunningham, Catriona & Carr, Jenni & Mills, Jennie & Taylor, Natasha. (2021). It’s all fun and games until
someone loses an ‘I’ The imaginary in playful academic development. The Journal of Play in Adulthood. 3.
10.5920/jpa.849.
Hannush, M. J. (2021). Markers of psychosocial maturation: A dialectically-informed approach. Palgrave
Macmillan.
Maarten P. Koeners & Joseph Francis (2020) The physiology of play:
potential relevance for higher education, International Journal of Play, 9:1, 143-159, DOI:
10.1080/21594937.2020.1720128
Manathunga, C. (2007). ‘Unhomely’ academic developer identities: More post-colonial explorations.
International Journal for Academic Development, 12(1), 25–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/
13601440701217287
Sicart M. (2014) Play matters. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Whitton, N. (2018). Playful learning: tools, techniques, and tactics.Research in Learning Technology, 26.