Playful and Creative Learning

“The world of simulation and immersive learning technologies is developing rapidly and in parallel to the existing and predicted future requirements of health and care on a global scale”.  [Enhancing education, clinical practice and staff wellbeing. A national vision for the role of simulation and immersive learning technologies in health and care HEE, 2020] This  #Take 5 reflects upon ways in which paramedic students responded to a compassionate pedagogical approach to debriefing groups after a high intensity simulation experience. Their experience through changing the ambience of the debrief transformed their session from one where students reported anxiety, insecurity where lecturing […]

Studies show nursing students experience significant maths anxiety (MA) (Bull 2009; McMullan, Jones and Lea 2012); this is the ‘fear or an adverse emotional response to the idea of doing mathematics’ (Hart and Ganley 2019, p. 122). As MA is correlated with lower maths performance in nurses (Bull 2009), Dr Katie Woodhouse-Skinner (Academic Skills and Statistics Tutor) and Hannah Glenn (Senior Lecturer in Adult Nursing), wanted to know whether they, as university healthcare academics and library academic support working at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), could work together to reduce MA in the healthcare curriculum, using alternative pedagogies to develop students’ […]

This #Take5 is brought to you from Simone Maier. Simone is an inspirational lecturer in the LondonMet School of AAD – art, architecture and design – and is soon to complete an MA in Art Education, Culture and Practice at the Institute of Education (IoE).  Working with Simone, we became fascinated by the concept of practice-based research – where the practitioner makes something – anything – as a way of exploring or researching their own theory and practice. This, we thought, was something that every practitioner – every educationist – should think about and get involved with.  Read on and […]

Play provides the energy, the eruptions, the poetry and the connectivity for engagement and success. Play transforms deficit-fixing teaching, it is creative and emergent, it provides spaces and places of reimagining and agency – play has the power to transform education, and educational experiences and outcomes (Sinfield et al., 2019). This #Take5 is brought to you from Sandra Sinfield (London Metropolitan University), Tom Burns (London Metropolitan University) and Sandra Abegglen (University of Calgary). Drawing together playful, arts-based and creative practices, this post offers theoretical arguments for why we all need a more creative Higher Education (HE) to build a more […]

This #Take5 is brought to you from Lisa Clughen, Nottingham Trent University. It is both about the importance of movement in HE – and an invitation to participate in a small research project focussing on qigong-based mindful movement in HE. #Take5 steps? Taking Positive Steps in Learning and Teaching: An Invitation to Participate in Mindful Movement Research. Image: Lisa Clughen doing some Mindful Movement at the Lourve-Lens, France If you could do a very short activity during your working day that, research suggests, could reap wide-ranging rewards for your physical, cognitive and mental health and wellbeing, and in fact for […]

This #Take5 is brought to you from our very own Lee Fallin. Lee has been exploring and playing with this AI technology for some time now – and we asked him to share his insights with the wider LD community. So – read on – and let us all join the conversation about what these revolutionary techs mean for our students and for us.  If it’s all about the ChatBots: What about Learning Development? This blog post will muse on the ‘rise of AI’ and what this means for Learning Development. I am not an expert, but I have spent much […]

This #Take5 is brought to you from Julia Reeve – and it is a beautifully detailed and thoughtful look at  LEGO® Serious Play®. Julia Reeve is a National Teaching Fellow based in Leicester who works in diverse educational settings including Further, Higher, prison and community education. Her practice focuses on building confidence, connection and creative thinking via imaginative, multisensory learning. If you’ve never attended a LEGO® Serious Play® session yourself – please, please read on.   Setting the scene My name is Julia Reeve, I’m an educational consultant and part-time lecturer in the Faculty of Business & Law at De Montfort University, Leicester. I’m […]

This month’s #Take5 is brought to you from Daisy Abbott an interdisciplinary researcher and research developer based in the School of Simulation and Visualisation at The Glasgow School of Art. Daisy experiments with game-based learning – and has created a novel approach to teaching research skills. Research: Mapping and Pathfinding My name is Daisy Abbott, I’m a researcher in game-based learning and teacher of postgraduates at the School of Simulation and Visualisation at The Glasgow School of Art. Join me on my quest to navigate the dangerous lands of teaching Research Skills… Keywords: Research skills, academic skills, higher order thinking skills, […]

By Dr Selen Kars-Unluoglu (University of the West of England) & Prof Burcu Guneri-Cangarli (Izmir University of Economics) Arts-based methods which traditionally rely on engagement with material artefacts (e.g. LEGO® bricks, finger puppets, craft materials) have been on the rise in management learning and teaching (Taylor and Ladkin, 2009). COVID-19 has challenged educators to adapt these methods to online teaching environments. The challenge was to get learners to move from thinking to thinging (Knappett & Malafouris, 2008)in online environments without the opportunity to pass on, share, co-engage with material artefacts in a physical setting. While there has been some discussion […]

This #Take5 post is brought to you from Debbie Holley and Heidi Singleton, Bournemouth University, UK – who also delivered this as an engaging LD@3. Challenge that ‘Zoom Gloom!’ (Wiederhold 2020) Learners describe their ‘best learning moment’ as a ‘flow’ – a point of psychological deep involvement of immersion in an activity or a task, which results in deep learning and high levels of satisfaction (OU Innovating Pedagogy Report 2021). The Learning Development community are experts at creating these types of activities (see the amazing LearnHigher site); this post explores how we can further enhance our student offering through considering extending learning opportunities through simulations. Students report […]