Part of the Play and Learning presentations This session will explore the value of play and how it can enhance student learning in Higher Education. Colleagues from the School of Education invite you to explore the benefits of Play in education in which play challenges assumptions of traditional HE learning and identify ways in which Play can be incorporated into your own teaching.

1. Playful Fieldwork
Urban Exploration Special Subject
Richard Phillips
University of Sheffield

5. Play / Learning in Teaching
Beneficial or ‘Serious’ Play
• Adults, but also Children
• Intended and Unintended
Outcomes or Benefits
• Not necessarily Easy
• Can bring Risk
Principles and Standards
• Learning objectives
– Theoretical engagement
– Methodological innovation
• Not for everyone: Students free
to opt in or out
• Anxiety about creativity
• Risks managed, Safety

6. Examples from my teaching/publications
‘How to be an explorer:
rediscovering your
curiosity’ – chapter
‘Playful and multi-sensory
fieldwork: seeing, hearing
and touching New York,’
Journal of Geography in
Higher Education, Vol. 39,
No. 4, 617–629

7. Specialised Topics: Urban Exploration
1. To develop breadth of awareness and depth of
appreciation of creative, experimental and subversive
ways of seeing and conducting research in human and
specifically urban geography.
2. To develop an individual research project, while
participating in a collective fieldwork experience.
3. To develop confidence in self-directed, creative,
adventurous, curiosity-driven geographical
scholarship.

8. Seminar Themes
1. Sensing the city: the visual and
other modes of perceiving,
apprehending, understanding
2. Writing the city: Georges Perec
and the Situationists
3. City as Archive: the built
environment as data, with multiple
layers, associations, meanings.
4. Digital urban research: enhanced
and virtual realities: collecting,
manipulating, experiencing

9. Student Ideas Changed and Developed
Proposals
1. Revisiting the Baltic
Triangle
2. Public space, design and
women’s mobility
3. How obesity is
‘experienced’ in Liverpool
4. Cinematic space
5. Urban Expeditions
6. No idea!
Actual Projects
1. 3D Mapping: soundscape
2. Exploring and documenting
dark and light spaces
3. Bubbles, curiosities,
encounters
4. Buskers and soundscapes
5. Documenting derelict and
ruined buildings
6. Encountering the city
through gaming

13. r.phillips@Sheffield.ac.uk
@PhillipsSpace