I ran a workshop at the Playful Learning Conference in Leicester last week where we made new (or forgotten) fairy tale creatures representing aspects of play or playfulness. Participants wrote short bios and what they'd need to thrive and multiply into the world. The same things required to make these creatures thrive could equally be seen as ways to enable play / playfulness to thrive too! When I have time / energy I'll list some of the creatures (the photo above is Jing, from Alex's twitter - didn't want to embed just in case Twitter completely explodes shortly).
The ways participants thought they could allow their creatures to thrive are (in brief):
- Collaboration
- Appreciation of fun
- Getting into nature more
- Accepting creatures (people) as they are
- Making room for play
- Undermining barriers to play
- Bringing together creative people
- Looking towards allies for support
- "Yes and..." to extend play not shut it down
- Purpose
- Permission to pause for a while
- Sufficient mental and physical space
- To be able to move freely mentally and physically
- Support for faciliators
- A sense of belonging
- Acknowleding emotions
- Enabling autonomy
- An active community
- A willingness to question and to adapt
- Acceptance that we need people (the invented creature!) who encourage play and that a visit from them is a gift
- Universities should build people who encourage play into their wellbeing plans
- Curious people / natures
- Embracing fun (laughter, giggles, chuckles and guffaws!)
- Time - to prioritise creative, playful thinking. But also to recharge.
... do these sound familiar? I think they sound like valid ways to help us all play more, not just the fairy tale creatures they created :)
