Cognitive playfulness, creative capacity and generation

Abstract

This paper draws on an ongoing doctoral study of student engagement with new digital media technologies in a formal schooling environment to demonstrate the importance of playfulness as a learning disposition. The study shows that cognitive playfulness mobilises productive engagement with learning innovations in the context of a traditional learning culture. Specifically, the paper discusses findings that emerge from a quantitative study into the level of student engagement with, and usage of, one school’s digital innovation in the form of a new Student Media Centre (SMC). The study analysed how different student learning dispositions influence the extent to which students engage with new digital technologies in the context of their otherwise traditional schooling. What emerges from the study is the interesting finding that cognitive playfulness, defined as ‘the learner’s dexterity and agility in terms of intellectual curiosity and imagination/creativity’, is a key factor in predicting students’ valuing of the opportunities that Web 2.0 open-source digital learning affords. In presenting an empirical validation of this finding, the paper contributes new knowledge to the problematic relationship between student-led digitally-enhanced learning and formal academic schooling. Play is a much misunderstood and trivialised human action. Rather than being the antithesis of work, it is the sort of progressive, imaginative, self-interested, ritualistic, frivolous, carnivalesque and cosmic activity that allows us to be “energetic, imaginative and confident in the face of an unpredictable, contestive, emergent world” (Kane, 2004, p. 63). Education has been unable to understand or endorse the value of “the play ethic” because it has, according to Kane (2004, p. 75), “slipped between a Romantic and a utilitarian model” of play, dividing off “rational and irrational recreations”. In doing so it has disallowed - and disavowed – the value of play as a ‘multi-literacy’ for 21st century life and work.