Friday 14 February 2025, 2.30 – 4.30pm GMT
This is an online event. Please register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_uPMjHdHJSTKandbViEMpsA#/registration
Fun-ing: Education for a changing world
Dr Sarah Huxley (University of Lincoln)
chaired by Dr Emily Dowdeswell (Director at Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination)
Abstract
At a time when many educational and research practices, more specifically those that consider ‘life skills’, focus on things ‘that are deemed useful, positive, teachable, concrete and objectifiable’ (Ronkainen et al. 2021, 2), there is a need and thirst for greater understandings and possibilities for fun, arts-based, and enlivened practice. This playful seminar draws from a transdisciplinary, socio-cultural-material ethnography, of fun and learning, which took place within an educational charity that uses the concept of ‘Purposeful Play’, Coaches Across Continents (CAC) (2020-2022). The seminar introduces the concept of ‘fun-ing’ and the ‘Six principles of fun embodied learning’ as ways to foreground and reconnect with experiential and relational qualities of learning, rather than learning outcomes alone. The principles focus on joyful and novel ways to: inhabit spaces; relate to each other; pace activities; consider non-verbal ways of communicating; recognise online-offline capabilities; and measure learning focused on feelings and affect. It will also discuss some of the ethnographic complexities concerning reflexivity, and the trans-disciplinary nature of the study. The provocation is for participants to consider what they value as their own qualities of learning experiences, and to find ways to etch them into everyday micro-actions.
Bio Sarah Huxley
Sarah has over 25 years of experience as a social development specialist in Global Development focused on Youth, Non-formal education, Culture, and the Arts. She is currently the global Research Engagement Manager at the British Council, a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Lincoln, a Trustee for the Child to Child charity, and a huge supporter of Cambridge Curiosity Imagination. She has been privileged to serve in a range of contexts, with a variety of inspiring people – from trafficked girls in Kathmandu care homes to policymaker panels at multi-lateral organisations including the OECD and UN.
She is driven by creating and facilitating opportunities for young people to have a meaningful role in shaping their own futures, and understands that as an adult researcher and co-learner, there can be many challenges and contradictions in this.
Her work around the world, has always encountered highly contested narratives and approaches relating to ‘creativity’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘participation’. Sarah completed her PhD in 2022. Her thesis, an embodied ethnographic study, examined how ‘fun’ contributes to socio-cultural-material learning processes, directed towards self and community social change, with a sports and play-based charity, Coaches Across Continents.
Bio Emily Dowdeswell
After a first degree in social anthropology (Archaeology and Anthropology), and several years working in the music industry, Emily returned to research to better understand the role of the arts in education, adopting arts-based research methods to understand children’s perspectives of learning.
Emily’s transdisciplinary research emphasises listening to children, advocating for the importance of creative spaces of learning, and reimagining our understanding of fun and learning. Emily is now leading award-winning arts and wellbeing charity, Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination, helping communities foster deeper connections with each other and the world on their doorsteps.
In these times of colliding emergencies, CCI believe in the power of strengthening collaborative practices between research and practice, and work regularly with researchers to enrich public engagement and outreach programmes, and to promote conversations and exchange between research insights and grassroots practice
