From What Is to What If to Let’s Try: a Treasure-Box for the Playful Academic

TY - JOUR

T1 - From What Is to What If to Let’s Try: a Treasure-Box for the Playful Academic

AU - Lübbert, Annika

AU - Heimann, Katrin

AU - Gonzáles-Férnandez, Pedro

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - Academia is the global institution for higher learning. Its job is to gather wisdom, develop skills and educate new generations of researchers. Over the last decades, ever more scientific research points to playfulness as a key ingredient of sustainable learning environments. Nonetheless, academic culture largely ignores or even suppresses playful engagement. In this paper, we address this paradox: as three researchers from different disciplines, we compose a set of concrete activities to support playfulness in academia. Here, we present the process and preliminary outcome of this collaborative endeavour: we introduce the concept of playfulness (a motivational loop) and philosophy (4EA cognition) that informed our approach, motivate our particular choice of method (‘scores’ and a selection of movement and awareness practices), and document our playful exploration in the form of a protocol, empirical evaluation and supporting documents that make our results available to other researchers. As such, we promote playfulness as a sustainable learning practice, and invite you to join us in bringing it to life in the lab.

AB - Academia is the global institution for higher learning. Its job is to gather wisdom, develop skills and educate new generations of researchers. Over the last decades, ever more scientific research points to playfulness as a key ingredient of sustainable learning environments. Nonetheless, academic culture largely ignores or even suppresses playful engagement. In this paper, we address this paradox: as three researchers from different disciplines, we compose a set of concrete activities to support playfulness in academia. Here, we present the process and preliminary outcome of this collaborative endeavour: we introduce the concept of playfulness (a motivational loop) and philosophy (4EA cognition) that informed our approach, motivate our particular choice of method (‘scores’ and a selection of movement and awareness practices), and document our playful exploration in the form of a protocol, empirical evaluation and supporting documents that make our results available to other researchers. As such, we promote playfulness as a sustainable learning practice, and invite you to join us in bringing it to life in the lab.

U2 - 10.5920/jpa.875

DO - 10.5920/jpa.875

M3 - Journal article

SN - 2632-1254

VL - 3

SP - 52

EP - 70

JO - Journal of Play in Adulthood

JF - Journal of Play in Adulthood

IS - 1

ER -