Playful Learning 2026 Programme
Guardians of the Learning Forest: Growing Interprofessional Education Together
Lead Author: Ailsa Dollard
Additional authors: Dr Emma Gillaspy, Dr Abhilasha Jones, Dr Emma Darbyshire, Steven Seymour, Ann Urmston, Amy Edwards-Smith
Timetable: Thursday Session 6: 12:00-12:45, Terrace Room
Description:
Interprofessional Education (IPE) is widely recognised by health and social care regulators as essential in preparing students for real world practice, and the World Health Organization (2010) positions IPE as a global priority for building a collaborative, flexible workforce. Yet, despite its importance, many universities continue to wrestle with the practicalities of delivering IPE at scale — from scheduling and space, to ensuring learning remains meaningful and engaging for students (Howard & McCoyd, 2023; Patel, Begum & Kayyali, 2016).
At the University of Lancashire, our team of 22 cross institutional educators (Gillaspy et al., 2025) decided to flip the challenge on its head. Instead of treating IPE as a logistical obstacle, we approached it as a playful, creative design opportunity. The result? A fully embedded, whole institution model of IPE now running across 20+ health and social care programmes, dismantling disciplinary silos and nurturing curiosity, collaboration, and practice readiness .
Insights: Growing collaboration through playful design
Over the past academic year, our team has co created and facilitated 70+ IPE learning experiences across three campuses, reaching over 3,000 students.
The learning journey is intentionally playful and progressive, guiding students through:
• Learning alongside each other
Self-awareness, curiosity, and early collaboration skills.
• Learning about each other
Roles, responsibilities, stereotypes, and shared purpose.
• Learning from each other
Joint decision making, teamwork, and person centred thinking.
Our pedagogical approach draws on experiential learning and heutagogy (self determined learning) (Hase & Kenyon, 2000), both of which align naturally with playful learning principles. These methods have been linked to enhanced self efficacy, problem solving , and collaboration (Gillaspy & Vasilica, 2021), all key competencies for the future workforce.
The programme brings IPE to life through largescale online simulations, creative case based learning, playful problem-solving, and escape room style activities that encourage exploration, agency and teamwork.
Our evaluation demonstrates:
• Statistically significant improvements in students’ perceived teamwork skills
• Rich qualitative feedback highlighting deeper understanding of roles and greater readiness for practice
• Strong engagement from students and staff, with many facilitators adopting playful-learning strategies back in their disciplinary teaching
This session shares:
• How playful, flexible pedagogies create powerful IPE learning moments
• Why our hierarchy free leadership model has built belonging, confidence, and joy among educators
• Approaches to overcoming logistical barriers through creativity, digital tools and shared resources
• Our research and evaluation framework for sustainable innovation
The session will showcase a variety of our IPE sessions to allow participants a flavour of the variety and scope of the learning opportunities we offer. Playful participants will engage in a selection of our interactive IPE through a sepsis escape room, menopause puzzle room, sexual health communication carousel, neurodivergence co design studio and safeguarding case challenge. These activities build teamwork, communication, inclusive practice, shared decision making and safe clinical reasoning across authentic, scenario based learning experiences.
References, web links and other resources:
Dabbous, M., et al. (2023). Instructional educational games in pharmacy experiential education: A quasi‑experimental assessment of learning outcomes. BMC Medical Education.
Gillaspy, E., Darbyshire, E., Davidson, M-C., Seymour, S., Rees, M., Jones, A., Urmston, A., Dollard, A., Edwards-Smith, A., Ashworth, L., Docherty, A., Johnson, S., Stewart, H., Owens, H., Davies, H., Littler, G., Kilmurray, S., Thomas, V., Jones, P., McGrath, A., Willingham, F. and Markwell, K. (2025) University of Lancashire Interprofessional Education Leadership Team.
Gillaspy, E. and Vasilica, C. (2021) ‘Developing the digital self-determined learner through heutagogical design’, Higher Education Pedagogies, 6(1), pp. 135–155. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/23752696.2021.1916981.
Hase, S. and Kenyon, C. (2000) ‘From andragogy to heutagogy’, Ultibase RMIT. Available at: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nph-wb/20010220130000/http://ultibase.rmit.edu.au/Articles/dec00/hase2.htm.
Hope, D. L., Rogers, G. D., Grant, G. D., & King, M. A. (2021). Experiential Learning in a Gamified Pharmacy Simulation. Pharmacy.
Howard, L.Y. and McCoyd, J.L.M. (2023) ‘Social work “voice” and interprofessional education: factors beyond professional culture’, Social Work Education, 42(8), pp. 1546–1562. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2022.2061944.
Patel, N., Begum, S. and Kayyali, R. (2016) ‘Interprofessional Education (IPE) and Pharmacy in the UK: A study on IPE activities across different schools of pharmacy’, Pharmacy, 4(4), p. 28. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/pharmacy4040028. Hope, D. L., Grant, G. D., Rogers, G. D., & King, M. A. (2022). Gamification in pharmacy education: A systematic quantitative literature review. International Journal of Pharmacy Practice.
Thomas, J. A., et al. (2023). Quality Pedagogy and Advanced Learning Strategies in Pharmacy Education: A Conceptual Review. IJPS Journal.