Search

Teacher education and social education are increasingly challenged to adopt student-centred approaches by focusing on learning spaces and materiality. This study reports on an integrative literature review to determine how space and materiality are approached in the research literature on playful learning in higher education. A thematic analysis of the selected studies was carried out and we identified three themes encompassing playful learning, space and materiality, one with studies explicitly approaching playful learning in higher education, another approaching "materiality as a catalyst for playful learning" and a third with an approach concerning "established educational methods including play, playfulness and materiality". We conclude that materials are invisible parts of playful learning, space is vaguely explored and no studies on play, learning, space and materiality address teacher education and social education.

This article presents playfulness as an emerging approach to learning in higher education that emphasises the arts and humanities across disciplines. The article is based on a qualitative, hermeneutical literature review in light of educational culture in higher education. The literature review indicates that playful approaches to learning stand in opposition to educational cultures that focus on rapidness and student performance. However, an educational culture of play is about to establish itself, and this culture of play emphasises creativity in learning and human flourishing in education, perspectives that are connected to arts and humanities. The main findings "cultures of time," "performance" and "play" lead to several questions about societal, institutional, and organisational educational culture, and regarding approaches to teaching, learning, humanity and society. The main contribution of this article is that a focus on playfulness offer the field of arts and humanities new possibilities in future education.

Educators who work with playful approaches in teaching often use methods inspired by art-based learning. The aim of the study was, therefore, to investigate how pedagogics of art-based learning can contribute to the pedagogics of playful learning in a way that neither compromises essential values of art, nor the values of play. The study included two steps. First, we analyzed 70 didactic designs developed and tested in 2021 and 2022 in the in the Danish Playful Learning Project (PL). Second, we conducted a collaborative in-depth analysis of 6 additional playful learning designs, also developed and tested in the PL project. The study indicates that art-based skills are an important prerequisite in order to realize the potential of art-based learning as well as playful learning. However, a focus on art-based skills can lead to a more entrenched perspective that interferes with the focus on open-ended processes and experimentation that are found within playful learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how student behaviour and interactions change when teachers use "producing" as a primary pedagogical strategy (Papert, 1980; Ejsing-Duun and Karoff, 2014). Based on observed student and teacher actions and responses, as well as students' production, this paper emphasizes the importance of understanding how students explore creativity and playfulness while producing in learning situations. This paper is based on a large research project called "Children as Learning Designers in a Digital School (2013-2015)", funded by Denmark's Ministry of Education, which included fieldwork in five Danish public schools, involved about 500 students, and comprised six interventions in the first, second, fifth, sixth, and tenth grades. The project's empirical data consist of observations, participatory observation, and productions students created during the interventions. This paper presents an analysis of how students were creative and playful while producing learning material as games during three of the project's interventions. The study is based on a specific understanding of the creativity with a point of departure (Boden, 2004; Tanggaard and Wegener, 2015) and playfulness (Karoff, 2013) that occur in learning situations. We approach creativity and playfulness as new methods of learning, through six areas of change that inform "[…]how today's kids play and learn, and, more generally, how they see themselves, relate to others, dwell in place, and treat things" (Ackermann, 2013: 119). This paper investigates how educators handle children's productive processes in a school setting and how teachers can conceptualize and nurture play and creativity as drivers for learning. In this context, the importance of skills and acknowledgement of reproducing and remixing existing materials is discussed. We further argue that playfulness is necessary for creativity to occur. From this point of view, it is possible to understand how learning activities can support creativity--an essential twenty-first century skill (Levinsen and Sørensen, 2015).

This article explores 4- to 7-year-old children's tablet computer (tablet) use, drawing on empirical data from day-care institutions, primary schools and private home settings in Denmark. Data were gathered via video observations in two different studies: (a) a media ethnography on children's tablet play practices in home settings and (b) a socioculturally informed, design-based study involving children as co-producers in institutional settings. We understand children's tablet use via practice theory, framing tablets as actor-enacted objects in play practices expressed through play moods in qualitatively distinguishable ways. We suggest a conceptual spectrum (not dichotomy) for understanding how sociomateriality is articulated in children's tablet play practices, ranging from absorbent to utensilent. Within sociomaterially absorbent practices, the tablet is foregrounded in intense involvement, thus mediating a focused play mood which relies on not being disturbed by outside actors. Within sociomaterially utensilent practices, the tablet is backgrounded as a node or nexus, thus mediating a distributed play mood of involvement with places and agents beyond the tablet. We contribute to previous findings by Marsh framed within the post-humanist approach as we suggest the empirically observed complexity in children's digital play can be approached by tracing the relationally generated object positions. We add to this by proposing an analytical spectrum ranging from absorbent to utensilent sociomaterial practices that can be employed when analysing children's digital play.

The aim of this article is to provide a theoretical framework to strengthen design thinking and practice in the context of teaching through productive processes and using it to generate knowledge. The article explores three modes of inquiry inspired by Dewey and based on Schön, Barab & Squire and DiSalvo to investigate academic inquiry in design pedagogy and design thinking. These three modes are aimed at generating knowledge in three different areas: the design practice (in order to be a good designer and create good designs), a given research area, and societal issues. Based on empirical study from a design course at Aalborg University, Copenhagen, where these three modes were taught, we show the potential in using design processes as modes of academic inquiry directed toward different subjects. By teaching the implication of these modes of inquiry, students are provided with more opportunities for action as design approaches include exploring the subject through visualisation and materialisation, and the methods for knowledge production are expanded.

The aim of this paper is to analyse how pedagogues are designing for children's play situations in schools. Based on design-based research and play design methods, the paper analyses three empirical examples using three theoretical concepts: play order, reflection in action and improvisation. A core argument of the paper is that the way in which pedagogues constantly observe, improvise and reflect on pedagogical practice is evident in how specific play designs are carried out. It is the capacity of professional pedagogues who understand play and children's perspectives and who consciously think about what they do while doing it, acting in the situation based on a specific reflection. This paper contributes to design for play activities, which are being developed in conjunction with the field of development within design practices and design research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights a methodological vagueness within the existing qualitative research interview literature related to reflecting where interviews takes place. The aim is to interrogate how the use of the concept of emplaced participation can account for the multisensory constitution of place within interviews as well as how the place can provide an opportunity to generate knowledge about participants' everyday practices. Casey's understanding of place as a gathering and Pink's perspectives on emplaced participation provide a sensitive epistemological approach that can be applied by researchers outside the field of ethnography. Based on empirical ethnographic material from fieldwork in Denmark, this paper makes a novel contribution to how researchers can use sensory and emplaced experience before and during an interview. We argue that, if we cease taking emplaced dimensions for granted, new methodological techniques can be developed, which, in turn, can lead to new types of knowledge of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]