Playful Higher Education: Why & How
This exciting instance of the TeLEd Monthly Event Series will feature Rikke Toft Nørgård, who is Associate Professor at The Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. Nørgård is in the steering group of Centre for Higher Education Futures (CHEF) and board member of the Danish Network for Educational Development in Higher Education (DUN). Her research focuses on the complexities and interrelationships of higher education futures, philosophy, playfulness and design theories. She is currently the coordinator and research leader of the Horizon Europe project EPIC-WE: Empowered Participation through Ideating Cultural Worlds and Environments: youth imagining, creating and exchanging cultural values and heritage through game-making (2023-2026). She is founder of the Playful University Platform (PUP) and has published books, articles and given keynotes on the playful university, playful higher education and playful teaching and learning.
Main content
Playful higher education (2021) and The Playful University (2024) brings together philosophy, pedagogy, practice, and play to explore menaces to modern universities and how we might rethink and reconfigure higher education using play and playfulness to create better institutions, environments, and experiences for staff and students. The menace of the growing performativity and marketisation of higher education has led to increased use of metrics and quantification, with an inevitable increase in instrumental behavior from management, staff, and students as they attempt to ‘game’ or ‘perform’ in this system. This stifles risk-taking, creativity, curiosity, and crucially the ability to learn, think, and act in open-ended ways. The talk – and books – on playful higher education presents an antidote to such approaches by opening an alternative space of and framework for higher education thinking, doing, and being.
References:
Nørgård, R. T., & Whitton, N. (Eds.). (2024). The playful university: Philosophy, pedagogy, politics and principles. Taylor & Francis.
Nørgård, R. T., Solheim, J. E. M. & Bukholt, K. J. (Eds.) (2021). Playful Higher Education: Voices, Activities and Co-creations from the PUP Community. Playful University Platform (PUP)
Nørgård, R. T. (2021). Philosophy for the playful university–towards a theoretical foundation for playful higher education. In The university becoming: Perspectives from philosophy and social theory (pp. 141-156). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
