Happy bank holiday weekend 🙂

I was watching the Golden State Warriors play the other day and it reminded me of how much I enjoyed playing basketball in primary school. I remember my coach used to always say “mark your partner like a big banana” and “where there is a will there’s a way”. Usually, the latter was followed by something along the lines of ‘travelling with the ball is not allowed but dribbling is and pivoting is- you always have an option”.   Putting a playful spin on things did a great job at embedding it in my memory…Needless to say, Dean was a great coach and his advice seems to be helping me navigate my Futures Project many moons later!

For the last month or so I put my project on the back-burner a) to focus on my other courses and b) because I couldn’t quite figure out how to feasibly answer my research questions. But after combining some wise sound-bites from coach Dean and Accountability Lab’s Cheri-Leigh, I realised that my approach wasn’t the right fit for me which was why it had been so challenging all along. So, I’ve decided to pivot and meet myself where I am with what I already have and to be open to exploring the unconventional…after all, Cheri’s equation for inclusive society was meeting people where they are/using unconventional methods + building unlikely networks.

In my early days of blogging, I shared with you all some thoughts on self-awareness and my personality type. Thinking along these lines, the levers I decided to pull to work around my dilemma were: my passion for accessible education, my tendency toward starting with simple and that I’m a contextual learner. For a moment, I put myself in a discussion with myself and asked the same questions I’d usually ask when ideating with social entrepreneurs (something I enjoy doing in my free time). i.e.  ‘what is the ideal?’, ‘how can we simplify, scale and diversify?’ and ‘what would a child do?’.

Then a couple of days ago I stumbled across the incredible work of Lego Foundation- who are pushing a strategy for accessible learning for all children through play. Simple but genius! …Lightbulb: What if I pivoted my final project to instead explore if agency for inclusive action can be learnt/built through play? After revisiting my research questions, I realised that play could be a potential solution to the problems I was trying to address. Obviously, I’d need to investigate the conditions under which play would work versus otherwise, alongside many other things but starting with the solution rather than a bunch of problems feels easier to lean into and has re-sparked my excitement.

Last note… the literature and case studies on learning through play and the benefits it can have (particular regarding agency and how this can be transferred) is very much geared towards children at the moment. When it comes to adults, the literature is much more fragmented and leans more towards agency within games as opposed to how games can build agency that can be transferred (or otherwise). So, there’ll definitely be a task which involves piecing everything together. It’s exciting that this hasn’t yet been done but I do question whether it’s enough, if primary research (perhaps interviewing designers of games that build agency) should, could or must come in, and if so, where…