Ludic Inquiries Into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education

Amelia Walker lectures in Creative Writing at the University of South Australia, on Kaurna Yerta, the unceded lands of the Kaurna people. She has been writing and publishing poetry since her teenage years. Her fifth poetry collection, Alogopoiesis, was published by Life Before Man (Gazebo Books) in 2023. Amelia’s research embraces creative methods of knowledge-making.Helen Grimmett is a teacher educator in the School of Curriculum, Teaching and Inclusive Education, Monash University, Australia, on Bunurong/Boon Wurrung Country. Her passion is taking playful and creative approaches to both her teaching and research in order to disrupt expectations and challenge traditional understandings of teaching, learning, and schooling.Alison (Ali) L. Black is a senior lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, on Gubbi Gubbi/Kabi Kabi Country. She uses autoethnography, poetry, and narrative to listen to and understand inner worlds and wider cultural experiences. Ali’s research recognises the importance of contemplating, acknowledging, and responding to lived lives.

• PART I. Philosophical sparks and promises of transformation. 1. Weaving conceptual, philosophical, and methodological threads amongst tapestries of privilege, power, and pedagogy. 2. Diversity and cultural pedagogical games and play: Through an Aboriginal lens. 3. Women leadership in higher education: Using positional power to change the game and amplify women’s voices. 4. Power and the game of higher education: Self-validating aggrandisement or transformational praxis?. 5. oWL, Bear, ::machine:: : Virtual NPC design as a shamanistic mode of resistance. PART II. Lived experiences. 6. Mahjong, the PhD and me: Which game should I play and how?. 7. Navigating the academic panopticon: An autoethnographic exploration of chronic illness, productivity, and belonging in academia. 8. Queer(y)ing board games as public pedagogy: ‘Playing out of bounds’ to activate LGBTQIA+ agency in academia and beyond. 9. Here to kick neoliberalism in the balls: The bogan in the university. 10. Games and invasion: Accounts of lived experience from First Nations writers, artists, and researchers. PART III. Pedagogical perspectives. 11. Academic kinship: I once had a game, or should I say it once had me?. 12. As play becomes practice: Observations on robust gamified education elements in the new normal. 13. Ludic reflections: Exploring strains of relational thought arising in a video games-based ‘STEMinar’ course. 14. Playing the game of education is playing the game of life for students with disability. Part IV. The spirit of play. 15. Playing with power and being played: Collaborative gameplay as a site of connection and insight. 16. Ludic lessons in liminality: A provocation from playing Solitaire. 17. Cards against academia: Playing the game of ‘opportunities’ through a feminist friendship lens. 18. Refluxus – Four soluble heads: Collective play through domestic art pedagogy. 19. Gaming the system: Choosing to play the infinite game in academia. 20. Remembering how to play: Breaking the rules (with meaning)

A highly useful resource for practitioners, emerging to established, operating across expansive modes of creative practice. Incorporating multiple perspectives, this text offers various methods – transferable and adaptable across a variety of disciplines – future-minded, action-based approaches to complex issues. A deft collection, offering playful opportunities for empathic and intersectional engagement. Associate Professor Julia PrendergastDiscipline Leader: Creative Writing, Literature, and Publishing (Swinburne University)President|Chair of the Executive Committee: Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP)This important book is essential reading for all educators interested the aspects of ‘play’ in its broadest sense, in the pedagogical arena. It is a timely reminder of the function and need for play to engage and invigorate students and teachers in all fields. Dr. Grant Caldwell, a senior lecturer in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Melbourne, where he has coordinated the large first-year Creative Writing subject for over ten years. Dr. Caldwell is also a widely published poet and novelist.This timely and multi-faceted book places games, game-playing, ludic inquiry, rule-making, rule-bending and rule-breaking firmly in the world of academic research into power, privilege, creativity, cross-cultural and colonial critiques, pedagogical methods, and the system itself of beliefs and practices that builds for us our universities and what we have come to call academia. And it is an important development. We need only reflect briefly on the deeply ambivalent values and ambiguous meanings we can draw from terms that are embedded in language to sense the importance of such an inquiry: ‘play the game’, ‘the long game’, ‘game-playing’, ‘gaming’, ‘the spirit of the game’, and many others to be found in this book. Most importantly, the book itself is an invitation to set out on the much ignored and even feared pathways of discovery-through-play.Emeritus Professor Kevin Brophy AMCreative Writing, University of Melbourne