Pedagogy of Play

Pedagogy of Play is a course that explores the art of teaching and learning through play. This course draws inspiration from surrealist games, Dadaist wordplay, Fluxus movement prompts, radical and progressive education experiments, exhibitions like the 1970 Jewish Museum show, SOFTWARE Information Technology: its new meaning for art, the teaching practice of Sister Corita Kent, Audre Lorde and bell hooks’ discussion of the erotic, Elvia Wilk’s exploration of live-action role-playing, and C. Thi Nguyen's Games: Agency As Art (2020). 

In this course, students will have the opportunity to design and facilitate playful invitations, prompts, scores, and/or happenings for their classmates. Additionally, students will design and present a playful art object as a workbook publication or portable FLUXUS-like kit. We will focus on questions of trust, care, and intuition in the teaching and learning process. More than anything, we will explore teaching and learning as a relational art, or what Octavia Estelle Butler calls “primitive hypertext.” We will consider how the playful invitations we design and facilitate can actively build relationships between people, places, ideas, materials, time, etc Play is an invitation for collaboration, risk, and learning. This class is organized around creating art objects that can be touched, manipulated, transformed, and destroyed in the process of learning and play. This course is interested in creating art objects for public engagement, not exhibition.