Alison James: fellow explorer and companion

Professor Alison James, free range educator, coach and play enthusiast, describes herself as a fellow explorer and a companion to those wishing to explore play and creativity in higher education. Academic identity can often resist play because of traditional conceptions of what academia is or should be, and it can take real bravery and courage to try something new and playful. People find their way to play through various routes: encountering it in a training session, through curiosity, by trying and failing with traditional methods, and that visceral feeling that comes from experiencing something themselves and wanting to do more with it. Writing can take the same approach, in that it is best experienced socially, with peer support, conversations, sharing, and making your ideas visible. True literacy, after all, is about being able to learn, unlearn and relearn. So make space for some play, and we can all take ourselves and our work more lightly! The resources we mentioned Engaging Imagination https://engagingimagination.com/ Helen Sword - The Writer’s Diet https://writersdiet.com/ Helen Sword, zombie nouns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNlkHtMgcPQ Professors at Play https://professorsatplay.org/ Stephen Nachmanovitch (1993) Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art Johnny Saldaña (2009) The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers And the paper and book we talked about James, A. R. (2013) “Lego Serious Play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development”, Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, (6). doi: 10.47408/jldhe.v0i6.208. James, A., & Nerantzi, C. (Eds.). (2019) The power of play in higher education: Creativity in tertiary learning. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.