Confidence is key
Not everything needs to be ‘fun’. We can’t play all the time. But what we can do is approach things playfully and find opportunities to play (Sicart, 2014). Part of my job as a Lecturer is to encourage curiosity, to support students’ inquisitive nature and to create opportunities for them to explore and demonstrate those attributes. This is something I’m exploring myself as an early-career educator; but inevitably, something I sometimes forget to do.
This semester I inherited our version of a ‘professional practice’ course. For 2 hours on a Tuesday morning our final year students and I would sit and discuss a range of topics designed to help them navigate life after art college. Some of these sessions involved students bringing in other artists work to discuss - for example, what worked and didn’t work about another animator’s showreel. The majority of them were semi-formal sessions where I would suggest a topic, we would discuss the topic and the students would ask questions and I would impart some of my learned experience as a professional animator.
These sessions were well received by students who fed back that they enjoyed the discusory nature of the sessions. However, reflecting back on the semester I feel like while my intentions were good, the focus was in slightly the wrong place. Throughout the semester I focussed on providing them with information, useful resources, tips and tricks of being a creative professional that I had learned over the course of my career-to-date. We talked about how to find work, the process of applying to film festivals and strategies for networking; we discussed other artist’s showreels and what we felt was successful/unsuccessful about them; we talked about intellectual property, contracts and briefing clients. But when it came to actually discussing themselves or their own work in groups, students became a lot more reticent. In one of the last sessions I ran, students were briefed to prepare a 60 second presentation about themselves and their work. This presentation time was purposefully short - the aim was not to provide space for a catch-all description of their style or story, but for students to start thinking about the way they engage the attention of someone interested in themselves and/or their work (e.g. a prospective client).
When briefed, the tension in the room was palpable; you could tell that none of the students were looking forward to the task. In order to combat this, we played an participatory card game (initially titled Who The Hell Are You?; WTHAY for short). During this game, players were given a set of basic question cards that they had to answer. Questions ranged from the personal (”Where did you grow up?”) to more work-focussed (”Who are your main influences?”) to the comedic (”Are you more of a Shrek or a Donkey?”). Players were then asked to contribute three of their own questions on blank cards, before the deck was shuffled and play began. Players would take a card and either answer the question, or ask the question of someone else. The overall idea was to get students to feel more comfortable telling their stories, and provide opportunities to ‘play’ within them.
What was immediately apparent was that the students wanted to know specifically what the rules of the game were, and began contributing and asking questions of the game itself. This engagement with the mechanics of the game itself provides a potential opportunity for students to play. What if I let them make the rules? What if we named the game together? Could there be more ownership and, consequently, engagement with the discussion the game facilitates there?
As the game went on, students began to discuss their own work and influences more, and asked follow-up questions of their peers when they answered questions. Once the game ended, their briefed task began. The students ultimately presented well, albeit with an air of trepidation about the process. Many of them struggling to meet the short 60 second timer when asked to talk about themselves. However, several of them referenced information and questions that we had discussed when playing WTHAY. This implies to me that playful tools such as WTHAY can be of great service when increasing student engagement with a process they don’t necessarily feel confident about at the start.
Of course, plays value in education is not new territory; there is wide-ranging literature on play and education [Bettleheim 1972; Dewey 1910; Smith & Pelligrini 2008; Vygotsky 2018]. But something that hadn’t occurred to me before is the value of play in increasing confidence [Lundberg, 2008; https://voiceofplay.org/benefits-of-play/, no date] - something which my professional experience tells me is just as - if not more than - important as the work itself when it comes to the professional industry. People want to know more about you. They don’t want to just know what you can do - they want to know who you are.
I believe that finding playful ways to engage students with the process of discussing and feeding back on their work is absolutely vital to students entering into their final year. I wonder how we can separate these opportunities from feeling like assignment requirements and encourage students to enjoy sharing their work and their processes.
Two immediate strategies come to mind, at least with this specific course in mind. WTHAY can be expanded out into a full workshop session, or run multiple times across the semester; and more opportunities must be found for students to practice their presentation and storytelling skills. When it comes to confidence, experience is a great teacher - a far, far better teacher than me. So perhaps I should give the students more opportunity to gain more experience building that confidence in a playful way. Designing workshops and activities that allow students to creatively and playfully engage with their own work appears to help break down some of the barriers between that work and their audiences. Perhaps engaging other years would help. So much of this comes with the institutional strings of timetabling, staffing and scheduling attached. But at its core, I believe that helping to develop and support student confidence in playful ways would help them see that meeting new people, applying for jobs, getting the opportunity to talk about your work are all, as Sicart would say, opportunities for play. They can be fun too!
References
BETTLEHEIM, B. 1972. Play and Education. American Journal of Education, 81**,** 1-13.
Benefits of Play [Online]. Available: https://voiceofplay.org/benefits-of-play/ [Accessed 12-04-2023 2023].
LÜBBERT, A., HEIMANN, K. & GONZÁLEZ‐FERNÀNDEZ, P. 2021. From What Is to What If to Let’s Try: a Treasure-Box for the Playful Academic. The Journal of Play in Adulthood, 3**,** 52-70.
LUNDBERG, K. M. 2008. Promoting Self-confidence in Clinical Nursing Students. Nurse Educator, 33**,** 86-89.
SICART, M. 2014. Play matters, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.
SMITH, P. K. & PELLIGRINI, A. 2008. Learning Through Play. In: TREMBLAY, R., BOIVIN, M. & PETERS, R. (eds.) Encyclopedia on Early Child Development. Montreal, Quebec: Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development and Strategic Knowledge Cluster on Early Child Development.
VYGOTSKY, L. 2016. Play and its role in the Mental Development of the Child. International Research in Early Childhood Education, 7.