After quite a break from blogging I am changing my path for a while - I am going to reflect on my research using questions provided to me by Roy Pugh and Bevis Yaxley. This serves a practical purspose for my studies in addition to giving me a chance to inquire into my inquiry. The first of these questions relate to purpose.
For what purposes am I involving myself in educational research? In other words, why am I involving myself in this?
Playfulness and freedom appear to me everywhere and in everything I do. Being free to learn, playfulness enabling freedom to learn etc plague me. Being plagued with freedom and obsessing with playfulness is something I need deal with! This is within me and I need to sort it out. Intrinsically these thoughts will not let me go until I inquire into them. I have experienced how powerful these thoughts are personally - generating questions such as:
- How might playfulness ensure transcendence of play?
- In what ways does playfulness, and my inquiry into it, affect what I do , how I interpret the world - my being?
- How do people exercise their playfulness, even when their world appears to be at its worst?
- What allows people to be playful and transcend the games of their own construction, even when they perceive them to be central to their being?
- I glimpsed shared playfulness and freedom within learning - what might allow this to be recreated for me and others?
How can shared play, games, playfulness and freedoms be created with others without them feeling played?
These questions, and many more, deserve and demand some attention.
What are the educational purposes that will be supported by my research?
I would like to take what has been personally empowering inquiry and explore the extent and nature that further research could be empowering for others. I feel that freedom and playfulness can be seen as central for learning beings and provide a place for being a learner.
Often in research and practice the fundamental, difficult, and problematic, question of what it is to be a learner (or a teacher) has been left behind or to one side. What is often carried forward is how to be a learner (or a teacher). I feel dimishing the is in favour of the how can mean that the essence, soul and substance of learning can fade. Freedom and playfulness appears to me to give an opportunity to have both. Even exploring this and its place in practice is educational purpose enough.
What are the purposes of the research for all of those different people involved in some way in the research?
As I inquire into freedom and playfulness I intend for a model for practice should emerge. This model will be tested with and by learners with the aim of increasing their freedom to learn through playfulness. As the aim of including others is for them to willingly reflect on their practice and learning I envisage that participating would at the very least assist participants in reflective learning and pratice. So participation would have its own intrinsic value for participants and the model would have to tailor itself to enable all people involved to have the freedom to learn through playfulness.
