How to use Play in Teaching?

This is a question raised by one of my group and I found it very relatable. “Playing” is a heavy part of my teaching as it is a heavy part of most interactive installations. When students are interested, they are willing to invest more time and effort in the learning process. While, it is not always easy to implement “play” in every part of my teaching or others’ teaching, like for some seemingly “boring” topics for students, like languages and career development, as my cohort suggested. It is even harder when it’s online. Very often, I found myself teaching into the void.

But I don’t think “playing” necessarily has to be equal to a game or a toy, but the sense of playfulness. When you are playing, you don’t want to stop. When you are studying, you are counting every second. At least I did. And how can I make students want to play and not want to stop?

Play Digitally

Then I think about who do I want to play with? My friends. Why? I trust them. This goes back to one of my questions after reading the paper, Teaching the tangible, remotely: Fashion as Material Culture. How to build trust with face-to-face interaction? Given the nature of my role, students are not timetabled to see me so they could choose not to. For my time in my teaching years, I am blessed to have lots of loving students, and I believed I have gained trust from them. And of course, there are students that I have only seen/ talked to once, mainly the ones I have never met in person, and I would like them to know they can come to me.

For this, I would like to try out some new ideas I got from the paper suggested by my cohort, and we will see how they go after I tried it with my guinea pigs students.

This was successfully achieved during the first synchronous workshop session when all participants undertook an object analysis of a now, very familiar object: the face mask.

Lomas, C. and Costantino, M. (2022). Teaching the tangible, remotely: Fashion as Material Culture. Spark, 5(1), pp.42–55.

Incorporating their domestic environment in the teaching. Specialised equipment is used in my workshop. For the online workshop, I used the site Tinkercad to simulate the circuit. However, the ‘wow’ factor of the workshop was taken away and the students did not seem very intrigued. After reading the paper, I realised a lot of my students used many mundane objects when they develop their own projects, such as pencil drawings, houseplants, knitted blankets etc. They can be easily found in a household and can be made conductive for an interactive circuit. So why don’t I use them in my online workshop?

The provision of safe space to discuss, question and debate allowed students to collaborate, extend and share knowledge and ideas, with examples, references and images posted onto Padlet (to which the students contributed during and after the synchronous sessions).

Lomas, C. and Costantino, M. (2022). Teaching the tangible, remotely: Fashion as Material Culture. Spark, 5(1), pp.42–55.

Utilising digital tools during and after the workshop. With some UAL digital tools expertise in my cohort, I know there are so many available online tools that I have no idea of. One particularly interesting to me is Padlet. I like the anonymous feature as the majority of students are not fond of showing their faces and shy in my experience, and sharing short prompts/images, which is quite effortless and easy, can get them out of their shells. Every time I asked, “Are there any questions?”, I usually got silence. Hopefully, Padlet will allow them to ask questions that they think are too embarrassing to ask.

I certainly need more exploration of other digital tools, and this also makes me wonder, how could we enhance digital literacy for teachers and students?

Boundaries

Over-trusting is another thing I would have to look into when I develop my relationship with students, as it has led me to “babysitting” in the past. To get a balance between trusting and over-trusting, there have to be boundaries. At the end of the day, they have to stand on their own two feet.

When you go online, the boundary between teachers and students seems to get even more blurred. Short text, email from 2am, emoji…seems like something you do when you text your friend. And I feel bad for not being able to help during a holiday, for myself and for my students.

I guess these will be ongoing questions for me, and I would not find one perfect formula to deal with every single student, but I hope I can do better each time.