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How will you find space to play in the remainder of this year? How will you invite students to join you in playing for the rest of the semester?

"Play is intellectually rigorous. But it can also bring joy to the classroom. In this moment of multiple elongated crises, I believe that we need all the joy we can get." On this day off from classes, we hope you find some time to play, and to consider how to build in more opportunities for playfulness in your courses.

Francis Su's examples from this address are all specific to the field of mathematics, but his threads of play, beauty, and truth seem to apply to all fields, and his challenges about justice and love clearly apply to the entire educational endeavor.

A review of the book "Minds On Fire", which discusses "subversive play" as an engaging pedagogy. Part 3 in a series on the "Reacting to the Past" series of "role-immersion" games; the other 2 entries are linked from this one.

Francis Su delivered this address as the MAA Haimo Teaching Award Lecture. In it, he talks about the role which grace plays in teaching.

The new ACRL Framework for Information Literacy gives a higher priority to understanding how knowledge is produced and shared. This article discusses ways that could play out in the design of library services. How could it affect your course and curriculum design?

A description of the Reacting to the Past educational role-playing game. This article talks about the mechanics of running a Reacting to the Past game in class; it links to a previous article in the series in which the author describes his experience playing the game.

How do joint enterprise, mutual engagement and shared repertoire play out in your classes? (This is from the GLCA/GLAA Center for Teaching and Learning, which solicits your contributions.)

This Chronicle blogger concedes that "modularity" will not work at residential colleges -- at least not for all courses. Personally I think this reductionist trend is going too far. Students choose a major discipline. Students (often) choose a sub-discipline. Students choose which courses to take among all the possibilities. Students choose from among professors teaching those courses. The post takes this down to the level of the 10-minute video (or lecture). Really? What can one learn in ten minutes that stands alone so much that ALL the related knowledge can be ignored. Here's an example. A student watches a 10-minute video on coral reefs and learns that reefs are in danger due to rising ocean temperatures. Fine. But what is the reason? Does the threat to coral stem from the fact that they build their skeletons out of calcium carbonate? From the fact that modern corals are aragonitic and not calcitic? Does the symbiotic nature of corals and zooxanthellic algae play a role? Is there something else involved here? A combination of factors? Factoids? Do we really want our future generations making decisions about important matters based on what they remember from a 10-minute lecture or video?

We had a conversation in a staff meeting recently about "contemplative pedagogy"; this conversation from Xavier University of Louisiana's podcast is a good introduction. The way that contemplation plays into theory formation and the understanding of complex models is particularly interesting.

Interesting ideas about using formal constraints (even hidden ones) to inject some playfulness into a writing task. I wonder if our faculty writing groups might benefit from this approach occasionally!