Heather Montgomery is Qualification Director for the Open degree at the Open University and Professor of Anthropology and Childhood in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies. In this post, Heather reflects on a Student Hub Live (SHL) Live Broadcast on the 22nd June entitled, ‘Playfulness, Practices and Perspective: the art of learning from one another’. Here she shares her highlights and thoughts on the event.
Despite my many years at the OU (20 and counting) I had never taken part in a SHL event before and I was quite nervous – what was I going to say? What if anyone asked me a difficult question? And one of the themes was playfulness! What if I wasn’t feeling very playful on the day?
And how far does playfulness really have a part in learning anyway? So many questions and insecurities and, on top of all that, I only took over as Qualification Director for the Open degree in September last year, so I still feel very much like a ‘newbie’.
This is of course what many of us feel when we do something for the first time – slight panic, a fear of making a fool of ourselves or being ‘found out’ – and I quickly realised that this is exactly what this session was trying to challenge. When we are having fun, being playful, or enjoying something, we are caught in the moment and don’t worry too much about what we look like or whether we are good enough. We got an example of this from our Access and Open Student Representative, Kaz, who told us how she and her son learnt together by playing. Her son sounds a real scientist, not just because he has an amazing mother (which he obviously does!) but because they learn together in everyday life, walking through the woods, watching the water flow into local streams. Life is one big experiment for him and his learning is playful and full of joy.
We often see playfulness as distinct, or even oppositional to, the serious business of work or study, but Kaz’s observations got us all thinking about the importance of playfulness when we study and how it helps us to learn – and to teach. The session had started off with an ice breaker, asking the audience about their favourite toys growing up. I was expecting variations on Barbies, teddies, Lego or Action men, but instead we had a whole range of suggestions, including a model of an atom (with a name I tried and failed to pronounce) and it quickly became obvious just how serious play is, as well as how playful study can be.
By this time I couldn’t wait to go on but first we had another of our student reps, Dan, talk about Artificial Intelligence – another type of playfulness or the end of academic standards as we know them? It was a fascinating discussion, and I would highly recommend watching the session for yourself, which is available on demand from the SHL website.
Finally, it was my ‘turn’ and by this stage my brain was going off in so many directions, I found I had too much to say and not enough time. I was supposed to be talking about the importance of interdisciplinarity and why I valued the Open qualifications so highly but I went slightly off track and started to think about the ways I learn and also how I teach. When I first started at the Open University all those years ago, it was all about pouring the knowledge ‘we’ academics had into ‘them’ – the empty vessels we assumed students to be. ‘We’, the academics, were the experts and ‘they’, the students, were expected to soak up what we taught them and what we thought they needed to know. That I might learn from students was something I never really contemplated.
It seems so outdated now but it really wasn’t that long ago. Things aren’t perfect now, of course, but I love the fact that expertise is now shared, and that knowledge is a joint endeavour. It may have taken me longer than it should to realise the importance of lifelong learning, interdisciplinarity or playfulness in my own professional life but I am very glad I am finally getting there and many thanks to all the contributors to the SHL – Kaz, Dan, Lorna and Rob – for reinforcing this. And for making me forget my nerves!
Watch on demand the SHL Live Broadcast ‘Playfulness, practices and perspective: the art of learning from one another‘.