Where is the shoe pinching? on the challenges associated with playful practices in exams on the social education programme

This article is about the teacher educator as a playful role model as well as connections between student teachers’ professional development (Bildung) and their participation in study activities characterised by playful approaches. In the article, I focus on the teacher educator’s importance for such connections, which emerged as a recurring theme in the empirical data collected as part of my PhD project on one of University College South Denmark’s teacher education programmes in the years 2020-2023. Professional development (Bildung) should be understood as the type of formation that is reflected in the way in which professionals think about and go about their work (Hammershøj, 2017). The analyses in my thesis show that student teachers’ participation in study activities characterised by playful approaches stimulates their understanding of: 1. teaching methods and themselves as designers of teaching activities 2. themselves as disseminators of bodily playful teaching activities 3. differentiation and variation in teaching activities 4. children in teaching contexts and thus traditional teaching in existing practice. In this article, I will focus on the first two results, as this is where the connection between the teacher educator as a role model 106 and the students’ professional development is most evident. I exemplify this based on a single student’s story – Aisha’s story. As an introduction to this, I will briefly discuss the empirical data of my thesis and the understanding of the purpose – of creating designs for study activities characterised by playful approaches – that provided the foundation for the project. I will also elaborate on the understanding of professional development (Bildung) that has influenced my analysis and the results.