Educational questions of student participation in Playful Learning

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” (UCN, 2019 p. 7). A key argument for PL is that a playful pedagogy will allow more inclusive and engaging 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 good and competent student and the actual experiences with student participation in PL-activities.
In this paper we examine the complex relations between values and social relations in PL. Exploring how ideals of “the good and competent student” are (re)produced in PL-processes we investigate and discuss the implicit why, what the educational purpose in PL is and might be.
Methodology
We have conducted five so called reflection workshops with a group of PL-lectures. Each 1.5 hour workshop were recorded, coded and analyzed with a focus on “the good and competent student”.
Theoretical framework
With Nicolas Rose (Rose 1999), we see education as a practice where students are inevitably subjected to powerful and normative understandings of what a good student is and should be. Such subjectification processes are not necessarily explicit 233 or conscious, yet they form and shape students as future professionals in specific ways. Our data shows that although presumed to be more open-ended, PL is no exception, however, we find it educationally crucial to understand and discuss the ideals of the future professional that are produced and why.
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
educational values and social relations implied when educating future professionals. Understanding education as a practice that involves selection, choice and judgement (Biesta 2015), we hope to support that teachers, researchers and managers openly discuss and address other ways of judging, other possible choices and other practices.