Fairytale creatures at Playful Learning 2023

 

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 :)

New Article - Playful Learning for Information Literacy Development

Screenshot of the start of the first page of the article

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've just had an article published in the IFLA Journal, a loooong time after writing it (and roughly a year after it had been reviewed, revised, and copy-edited). It's behind a Sage paywall at the moment, but IFLA will put the whole issue up as open access on their site shortly, plus it should appear on my institutional repository soon. Happy to email it to anyone who can't access it too, just give a shout :)

Abstract follows... 

Play is often seen as frivolous, childish, suitable only for young children. In contrast, this paper will discuss the idea that using playful learning approaches is often a good fit for the development of information literacy in all ages. To do this, it will outline the meaning of information literacy that the author takes, explain where playful learning is placed within learning theories and pedagogies, and show why and how they fit together. Examples of playful practice in library and information literacy training will be given to illustrate current practice, together with gaps within that practice. It will briefly address some of the barriers to using playful learning approaches in information literacy development, and offer some ways forward for information literacy practitioners.