EPSY8121: Play-based Learning

Play has been described as nature's implicit design for learning, and yet play is both notoriously difficult to define and often marginalized in formal schooling. To understand this situation, this course will draw on scholarship primarily from educational psychology and learning sciences perspectives, and secondarily from conversation analysis, game studies, and evolutionary psychology perspectives. The course will build toward an understanding of core features of play, including how rules structure play, how players inhabit roles, and what constitutes playfulness. Students will then apply this play framework critically in reflections on the design of play in learning environments, covering how play differs from games, how power operates within play, how to design for failure in play, and why play is a brittle social activity. The course is meant primarily for graduate students in the Department of Educational Psychology and within the College of Education and Human Development who have an interest in studying the role of play in learning and/or designing learning environments to nurture play. Students in this course will have opportunities to design for play, examine through qualitative methods video data of children playing during learning, and plan for how play might inform their research.

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