Are they playing? Analysing “play” in playful learning in occupational therapy education

Abstract

Playful learning has become a common practice in Denmark, across primary and secondary education, however, the phrase playful learning might sound like a paradox, because learning and play suggest opposite values. In playful learning, play is approached as a learning resource, able to foster understanding and critical thinking. In the Occupational Therapy (OT) education, there has been a rich exploration of different forms of digitally mediated role-play, to enable students to prepare beforehand to engage with patients, enacting clinical scenarios with each other. Current studies in OT education focus on the learning impact of digital media and role-play, not investigating how students experience their play, which is an essential pre-condition to learning. Starting from these premises, I conducted a design-oriented research study, involving students and teachers in OT in Denmark, to investigate how students experience their play during mediated role-play activities. Results show that playful learning is a complex sociomaterial practice, framed by power relationships embodied by the provided digital media, the relationships among the participants, and the institutional context. Within this framing, play is continually negotiated among the teachers and the students, who manage to gain room for self-expression through observable changes in play moods and practices.

Exceeding and digital materiality in the classroom a student’s perspective on roleplay in higher education

“…OT is defined as a rehabilitation practice, aimed at supporting patients in learning how to transform daily activities into therapies or how to make such activities less painful when patients are dealing with chronic pain. The goal of the Ergoworld project was to design a digital simulation which could support roleplay practice for OT BA students (Marchetti 2020;Marchetti and Petersen, 2019). The students from SDU are enrolled into ET, an engineering education with focus on design and development of interactive systems, like games, websites and apps, or tangible installations.…”

“…Starting from these premises, in this study I aim at investigating how students in higher education are experiencing play during playful learning, how they interact with each other while they engage in roleplay activities and if they are playing at all. This paper represents a follow up from Marchetti (2020) in which I analyze play in playful learning looking at the experience of OT students, reconducting play to its original meaning as a self-determined, fun activity centered on the players' needs. In this case, I wish to expand from the previous study, comparing ethnographic observations of OT students captured during exercises of roleplay targeting diagnostic techniques for patients affected by dysphagia, with ET students in a course in Interaction Design captured during a roleplay activity targeting visual ethnography with technology users.…”

“…In OT education roleplay is adopted to prepare students to perform the clinical dialogue (Marchetti, 2020;Marchetti & Petersen, 2019;Kielhofner, 2008), a diagnostic and therapeutic practice, which could be compared to ethnographic participant observations (Ylirisku & Buur, 2007). OT therapists are supposed to formulate a diagnosis or a therapy by observing and participating in the patients' activities, interacting physically and verbally through the artefacts involved in such activities.…”

“…Data for this study was gathered through qualitative ethnographic observations with bachelor students in Occupational Therapy (OT) at University College Lillebaelt (UCL), and in Experience Technology (ET) at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). The study with UCL was part of the ErgoWorld project, which was funded by the Danish InfinIT foundation and was conducted within a consortium involving Danish OT educations and practitioners in Denmark (Marchetti, 2020).…”

Construction of a Web Game for the Teaching-Learning Process of Electronics during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Technological tools enable students to acquire the requisite knowledge from the courses they attend, irrespective of their location (Aeberhard et al, 2019;Demir, 2020;Hawamdeh & Soykan, 2021;Hebert et al, 2021). The incorporation of web applications within the educational field favors the active role of students both inside and outside of the classroom (Burnett et al, 2020;Lim & Newby, 2020;Marchetti, 2021).…”