🗓️ Tuesday 20 May 2025  🕑 14:00-15:00

• 🔴Theme: Exploring innovative course design and assessment strategies for digital environments

Enjoyable learning, despite disruption and constraints: speculatively-informed, playful and subversive course design

Sarah Graham

Recording

Abstract

This presentation uses a case study – the delivery of Geography A-level (EQF level 3) Power and Borders in a Sixth Form College – to explore the benefits of playful critical engagement.

This case study is apt because the conditions are challenging. A level Geography is timetabled in a disrupted term. The students are culturally diverse, their attendance is uneven, and they study synchronously, asynchronously, formally and informally. The course also demands critical engagement with media sources and contemporary geopolitical events, assessed by a high-stakes written exam that rewards recall. This study operationalises playful critical engagement as a method of involving students as co-designers and constructors, creating space for their learning through emergent activity (Carvalho and Goodyear, 2018).

Learning activities include the speculative suggestions of Dunne and Raby: “fictional worlds, cautionary tales, what-if scenarios, thought experiments, counterfactuals, reductio ad absurdum experiments…” (2013, p3). I have deliberately chosen these with subversion in mind, as a form of resistance against the neoliberal market-driven cultures that might otherwise inform the design. This is also intended to improve engagement, in turn positively affecting learning outcomes. Following completion of the first course instance, I intend to interview the students about their experiences and assess their learning.

References

Carvalho, L. & Goodyear, P. (2018) Design, learning networks and service innovation. Design studies. [Online] 5527–53.

Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2013) Speculative everything : design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge, Massachusetts ; The MIT Press.