plork.fun

Rules for plork

As part of my ongoing development in my own playful practice, I’m trying to approach more of my making and research with a sort of spontaneity - a willingness to embrace an idea and ‘run with it’, particularly if it’s one that sparks my creativity and excites me. I suppose, in a way, this is me creatively engaging with Eberle’s elements of surprise and pleasure (Eberle, 2014 p221), or, as Costello puts it, “switching back and forth between the explorative goal ‘what can this object do’ and the playful goal ‘what can I do with this object’” (Costello 2007, p370, referencing Hutt 1985, p246); in this instance, the object is an idea, and I quickly being playfully trying to ascertain what I can do with that idea. It is for this reason that I have spent the last week developing and exploring an idea I mentioned last week - the rules of plork. In the spirit of spontaneity, there was no methodology for developing these - as has become the methodology for much of my practice over the course of this research, I will reflect on the process

After researching rulesets and frameworks for playful pedagogy last week I thinking about a couple of questions:

This exercise was started in a discussion with colleague and fellow play enthusiast Robin Griffiths (University of Abertay), with whom we developed a series of rules that as educators we felt our students might benefit from:

Be kind. To yourself and to others. Kindness is everything.

Be honest. With yourself, and with others. But always consider Rule 1 - sometimes its kinder to be honest, but you have to be kind with how you’re honest.
Be an optimist. "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” (Bruce Mau p68).
**Be brave. **Try new things. Push yourself. Challenge your teachers and colleagues, and ask your teachers and colleagues to challenge you. Don’t be afraid of telling personal stories. You never know where they might lead.
Be self disciplined. Show up. Show up on time. Do the work. If you do the work, good things will happen.
Trust the studio. You’ll learn more about yourself and your work here than you will working from your bedroom. Fill your studio with beautiful, colourful, wonderful, silly, noisy things and people, and let them inspire you.
Draw more. Look more. Do more. Keep a sketchbook of things you see, things you hear, things you feel. This is where ideas come from. After all, to tell good stories, you need good stories to tell.
Have a plan. Plans are good. Plans will help you know when it’s time to play, when it’s time to work and when it’s time to panic. But you won’t need to panic. Because you’ll have a plan.
Be flexible. Often things don’t work out the way we intended. Life happens. Work around it. Also, try yoga. It’s really good for you.
Stop trying to get things right. Get them wrong and learn from them.
Be your own reflection. Reflect on projects when they’re done. What worked? What didn’t? What can you learn from them?
Trust the process. You might feel uncomfortable at times. Work your way through it.
Challenge the process. Your teachers don’t know everything. Find new ways of working.

These rules satisfied most of the conditions we felt that as educators we wanted to see students engage with in their studio practice. Thinking back to Rikke Nørgärd’s Signature Pedagogy though, I realised that by dictating a set of rules for students I was not likely to engage students in a feeling of “democratic values” so much as dictats. Whilst I would never expect the rules to be adopted as formal guidelines within an institution, getting students to “buy in” to a set of values could help lay the foundation for the implicit “lusory attitude” (Nørgärd et al p278) that is necessary to engage playfulness in a studio classroom. Play cannot be forced - play needs to be vountary (Eberle, 2014). So I put out a quick informal survey with students via Microsoft Teams so gather suggestions of what students would want to see on a list of their fantasy studio rules.

The question was framed in the context of an imaginary studio where fun needed to be matched with productively producing work. This was to encourage students to step outside of any specific heirarchy or institutional mindsets, and hopefully encourage them to think about what they would have, not what they feel would work in the specific context of their educational establishment. As an example, I suggested a single initial rule: Be Kind. This rule was top of my own list of rules, and was used to demonstrate the rules as an opportunity for suggestions that were value- and ethics-based.

This survey was conducted relatively informally, was distributed via email and teams, and didn’t consider a formal design for the research. This yielded a relatively low response rate (17 responses). However, the results were still valuable whilst informally ‘playing’ with the idea of creating rules. This implies that an “adaptation and expansion of the original plan” (Busetto et al, 2020) - to consider this a formal part of the research and to design the research accordingly - would create even richer data to draw from.

I am still coding the responses to the survey, but an overview of the findings highlighted some key themes:

This was satisfying, as it demonstrated to some extent that our students expressed a desire for a similar learning environment to the students in Nørgärd et al’s studies. It also demonstrated that the observations Robin and I had made were, to some extent at least, accurate - these students want an honest, kind, supportive environment that allow an opportunity to fail. However, there were notable absences in our ruleset: physical activity, or exercise, for example. The detail and clarity with which students responded, though, suggested an engagement with the process as a whole.

This was something I had experienced myself while iterating on my original set of rules. I was engaged, excited; I gained pleasure from exploring subtle changes to wording, including suggestions from the student survey and tweaking the order of rules so they formed more of a conceptual heirarchy. As I did this, I realised that I was subconsciously ‘shaping’ the rules in a way that once again echoed Nordgard’s research: firstly, I had rules that demonstrated values and ethics (Be Kind, Be Honest); these were followed rules that encouraged collaboration and active engagment (Trust Your “Studio”, Be Self-Disciplined); these were in turn followed by more practical rules and mechanics (Be Self-Disciplined, Reflect); finally, I returned to value-setting (Fail More, Be Happy). This is a simplistic way of looking at the rules, of course, as most rules offer opportunities to engage with multiple structures across Nørgärd’s model - Trust the “Studio”, for example, suggests both the importance of a physical space, but also the notion of collaboration, and at an implicit level, the values of safety and community.

What was interesting to me after this exercise was thinking about these rules and Nørgärd’s signature pedagogy in the context of plork. It strikes me that if playfulness is a precursor to play, and play precedes ‘surface structure’ e.g. physical/digital artefacts, then Nørgärd’s signature pedagogy mimics the ‘journey’ of plork. And, by extentsion, so do my rules. [Fig. 1] In that regard, then, they become Rules for Plork.

Fig. 1 - The flow of the rules/rules as plork

The idea that they are rules for plork is important. To refer to them as The Rules of Plork, as I initially toyed with, implies they are definitive, closed.As we know, play is too personal, too subjective to tar with a single broad brush. I much prefer the idea that these rules are not so much the rules, as some rules - my personal rules, rules which started off as generic rules for a creative classroom, and very quickly became rules that I can see myself adopting in my practice [Fig. 2] .

Fig. 2 - A more developed set of rules

Fig. 3 - Developed poster of Rules for Plork

The experience of writing the rules and iterating on them has been entertaining, fun, addictive - there are always little tweaks to be made, a word that could be changed. Rule-making has inspired creativity. This process has inspired me to make posters, explore zines, schedule in time to learn printmaking techniques I wouldn’t have done without them. The rules are already supporting my playful creative practice. Not only that, but creative practice has been productive in shaping these rules - as I have been exploring ways of disseminating these rules, the rules have changed [Fig. 3]. So perhaps the act of writing rules can itself be a playful, creative act. If the rules could be used as an exercise to engage a playful, explorative, dynamic, democratic attitude in students, perhaps we should be asking them to write their own studio rules at the beginning of term. This could feasibly set a benchmark that would become part of - to riff off Nordgard et al - a signature pedagogy for plork.

So…what are your rules for plork?

References

BUSETTO, L., WICK, W. & GUMBINGER, C. 2020. How to use and assess qualitative research methods. Neurological Research and Practice, 2.

COSTELLO, B. 2007. A Pleasure Framework. Leonardo, 40**,** 370-371.

EBERLE, S. G. 2014. The Elements of Play: Towards a Philosophy and Definition of Play. Journal of Play, 6**,** 214-233.

NØRGÅRD, R. T., TOFT-NIELSEN, C. & WHITTON, N. 2017. Playful learning in higher education: developing a signature pedagogy. International Journal of Play, 6**,** 272-282.