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Forest School and its place within a Covid-recovery curriculum

With the easing of pandemic-related restrictions for UK schools, educators’ focus has turned to mitigating the impacts of Covid-19 on children’s learning and wellbeing (see Kumar Jha & Arora,...

The place of education in the government’s draft sustainability and climate change strategy

Recent research on climate change education in England indicates an absence of policy and pro-environmental ambition, and obstruction in relation to both environmental sustainability in general,...

Playful creativity

‘Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do.’ (Attributed to Jean Piaget) Learning is often compromised by competitiveness (Brown & Vaughan, 2009). Bred from the...

Playful interventions: Measuring impact on learning

Figure 1: PMM tracking individuals’ understanding of ‘playfulness and me’ over the course of several workshops and a field trip. Red text was added before any workshops were...

Does playfulness have a place in higher education? A reflection on using playfulness when teaching research methods to postgraduate students

Playfulness has been defined as a disposition (Barnett, 1991) a mindset (Skilbeck, 2017) and fundamental for creativity (Cheng-Ping Chang, 2013). I have spent many years working in play and...

Becoming a playful academic: A personal story

Throughout my life I have been exposed to an increasingly stressful and demanding expectation to perform, dictated not only by society (cultural pressures) but also through beliefs deeply...

Playful praxis: A student’s perspective

Now in my fifth year of higher education (HE), I am in the unfortunate position to have more years as an undergraduate to reflect on than most, yet still have more to look forward to. Yes, I am a...

Connection and creativity despite Covid-19: Playful learning at university during the pandemic

Over the past decade, interest in play and playful learning in higher education (HE) has grown significantly (James & Brookfield, 2014; James & Nerantzi, 2019). Publications, conferences and...

Editorial: The playful academic

Imagine a place of learning where progressive failing, building resilience, and developing individual and collective skills, values and creativity are not only thought about as a theoretical...

The playful academic

This special BERA Blog series, edited by Maarten Koeners, explores how play and playfulness can facilitate learning in higher education – from the points of view of educator, researcher,...

Sharing the ambition: Play and parental interest in Scottish early years education

BCF Curriculum Investigation Grant Research Reports

This report provides evidence from the Sharing the Ambition project, which investigates parents' perceptions of early years education in Scotland, what their priorities are in terms of settings'...

‘To fit in at school, you have to be a robot’: Do care farms offer a viable alternative?

In a recent and yet-to-be-published qualitative study, I explored the possible contribution of care farming (the therapeutic use of farming practices) to young people’s engagement with learning....