From What Is to What If to Let’s Try: a Treasure-Box for the Playful Academic

Academia is the global institution for higher learning. Its job is to gather wisdom, develop skills and educate new generations of researchers. Over the last decades, ever more scientific research points to playfulness as a key ingredient of sustainable learning environments. Nonetheless, academic culture largely ignores or even suppresses playful engagement. In this paper, we address this paradox: as three researchers from different disciplines, we compose a set of concrete activities to support playfulness in academia. Here, we present the process and preliminary outcome of this collaborative endeavour: we introduce the concept of playfulness (a motivational loop) and philosophy (4EA cognition) that informed our approach, motivate our particular choice of method (‘scores’ and a selection of movement and awareness practices), and document our playful exploration in the form of a protocol, empirical evaluation and supporting documents that make our results available to other researchers. As such, we promote playfulness as a sustainable learning practice, and invite you to join us in bringing it to life in the lab.