Sketch: Using LEGO® to Explore ‘Professional Love’ as an Element of Youth Work Practice—Opportunities and Obstacles

Abstract

The Power of Play in Higher Education "Academics are a justifiably sceptical lot and love to privilege logical and analytical thinking. To get us out of our routinized ways of creating meaning, assigning merit and judging worth we need to draw senses and powers other than purely rational cognition. Play galvanizes creativity, inspires action and triggers different ways of building knowledge. It's also an insurrectionary force that challenges bureaucratized and siloed thinking and practice. In this visionary book packed with wonderful vignettes, exercises, techniques and suggestions you will find ways to rethink and broaden your teaching and academic practice. Product warning: this book changes lives."-Professor Stephen Brookfield, University of St Thomas, USA "The importance of play as an ecology for learning and discovery is often overlooked in tertiary education, so these author/editors are to be congratulated for bringing together such a diverse and valuable set of pedagogical narratives about how play is being used to encourage learning and creativity in higher education. This is a 'must read' book for tertiary educators who are interested in and who care about the creative development of learners and themselves." -

Using Creative and Contemplative Pedagogy to Promote Learning Efficacy and Wellbeing within First-Year, Undergraduate Students

“…The multisensory techniques used in this intervention, namely LEGO Serious Play and Reframing, have been successfully used within De Montfort University and the wider Higher Education community. LEGO Serious Play has been shown to increase engagement among undergraduate students at University of Strathclyde (Savage & Faulkner 2018), and exercises with LEGO bricks have been found to develop empathy and social connection among Youth work students (Purcell 2019). Similarly, Reframing workshops have been shown to foster engagement, reflection and social interaction in workshops previously carried out at the casestudy institution (Reeve 2014), and have been used across disciplines (Reeve & Towlson 2019).…”