Playful Learning 2026 Programme
A walk through the woods: Embodying readiness for play in spaces of resistance through grounding, connection and reflection
Lead Author: Martina Diehl
Additional authors:
Timetable: Thursday Session 6: 12:00-12:45, Outdoors
Description:
Stepping into play can feel exciting for some, but for others it can be daunting, almost like stepping “into the woods”. Particularly in academic contexts, I have found that participants’ readiness to play varies. This workshop explores how I encourage readiness to play through movement and creative individual and collaborative reflection and expression while encouraging sharing knowledge and skills too. First, we’ll consider movement, which is ‘critical for our sense of fun’ (Hrach, 2021). Hrach (2021) emphasises that ‘physical synchronicity promotes a sense of belonging’ and that embodied learning can increase presence and curiosity, all elements that are interconnected with playful learning. In this session, we will take a walk through a metaphorical forest, and on this journey we will encounter three “trees”, at each tree focusing on a different way to feel ready to play: Grounding, Connection, and Reflection. Each tree offers embodied and creative strategies to recognise and encourage a readiness to play.
At the first tree, we consider grounding as you explore confidence and presence through activities inspired by Centered Riding principles: ground, centre, breathe, grow (Swift, 2014). Swift’s method for horse riders illustrates how playing with movement and metaphor in shared spaces fosters the physical awareness and safety that allows participants to be brave, which continues at the next tree, where we focus on connection. Through collaborative movement we invite participants to sense how collective synchronicity enhances trust and supports co created playful spaces. Finally, we turn to playful reflection either through language play or visual explorations (eg. Drawing, photos, etc.). Here, you will have the opportunity to bring your own experience and your new shared experiences together. Then, as you emerge from the woods, you will be invited to share your experiences and reflections in small groups to create a collaborative reflection using, again, forms of language play, such as poems and stories, or visual art. Hereby playing with multimodal ways of shaping our understanding on what it means to play.
By journeying through playful ways to encourage grounding, connection, and reflection, the aim is to foster inclusive and playful spaces, where students and facilitators can feel at ease to be brave (Perez-Putnam, 2016), open, and ready for play in higher education environments where the current focus is often on what is conceptualised by Ball (2012) as ‘performativity’: ‘reporting on what we do rather than doing it’, and moving away from our authentic, curious and creative selves and into a culture of productivity, which increases the fear of failure and decreases space for ‘social, emotional and moral development’ (p. 19). In these spaces of performativity, play can be the antidote (Nørgård & Mosely, 2021, p. 1), when facilitators and participants are ready to play.
References, web links and other resources:
Ball, S. J. (2012). Performativity, commodification and commitment: An I-spy guide to the neoliberal university. British journal of educational studies, 60(1), 17-28.
Hrach, S. (2021). Embodied learning: how to bring movement into the classroom, and why it matters, in The Times Higher Education, (26th November 2021). https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/embodied-learning-how-bring-movement-classroom-and-why-it-matters
Nørgård, R. T. & Moseley, A., (2021) “The Playful Academic”, The Journal of Play in Adulthood 3(1), 1-8. doi: https://doi.org/10.5920/jpa.954
Swift, S. (2014). Centered riding 2: further exploration. Trafalgar Square Books.
Perez-Putnam, M. (2016). Belonging and brave space as hope for personal and institutional inclusion. Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 1(18), 2.