Nera - 2022

Beskrivelse

NERA konference 2022

Educational questions of student participation in Playful Learning


Research topic
In Denmark a national development program in higher education – Playful Learning (PL) – has been implemented at all university colleges since 2018 with the overall aim: “to investigate how learning through play can become a cornerstone in the education of future teachers and pedagogues, which eventually will enable them to lay the groundwork for more playful approaches to learning in Danish childcare and school settings” (research extension s. 7). A central argument for implementing PL is to create more democratic and engaging educational processes, and that a playful pedagogy will allow more inclusive student participation.

As researchers we have been investigating the practice of the PL-project since 2019. We have made the observation that educators working with PL are mainly concerned with what Biesta would call the how of playful learning (Biesta 2015). There is only little and often very implicit discussion about educational questions, the why of PL. A second observation is that there are notable tensions between implicit ideals of the desirable student and the actual experiences with student participation in PL activities.

In this paper we examine how ideas and ideals of the good student in PL-processes is produced and reproduced in the PL-project, and through that we investigate the implicit why in PL.

Methodology
We have conducted five so called reflection workshops with a group of PL-lectures. Each workshop had a specific theme related to PL, they tock 1.5 hour each, and they were recorded and afterwords coded and analysed with a focus on the desirable student.

Theoretical framework
With Michel Foucault and Nicolas Rose (henvisning), we see education as a practice where students are inevitably subjected to powerful and normative understandings of what a god student is and should be. Such subjectification processes are not necessarily explicit or conscious, yet they form and shape students as future professionals in specific ways. Our data shows that although presumed to be more free and open-ended PL is no exception.

Expected findings
Our analytic purpose is to understand processes of subjectification as a lens to understand and discuss the educational purpose of PL in the teacher and pedagogue education. Thereby we analytically tease out implied ideas of educational purpose, reason and meaning of PL in practice: the why of PL.

Relevance to Nordic educational research
We contribute to research in higher education with critical knowledge on the complex relations between the normativity implied when educating future professionals and the practices and possibilities of student participation and inclusion. Understanding education as a practice that involves selection, choice and judgement (Biesta 2015), we point to the fact that we can also imagine other ways of judging, other possible choices and other practices.
We hope to enable and support, that teachers, researchers and managers openly discuss and address questions of what PL is good for in their specific educational practice, as well as addressing why and how PL might be educationally helpful in higher education og future teachers and social educators.

Periode	2 jun. 2022
Begivenhedstype	Konference
Placering	ReykjavikVis på kort
Grad af anerkendelse	International