LekForsk: Interdisciplinary Exploration of Play-Based Teaching in Language, Text and Mathematics

Project summary

The LekForsk project aims to address the students' desire for more emphasis on play in teaching, as well as the kindergarten teachers' aspiration to create a more interdisciplinary education. The project explores how we can further develop teaching by incorporating play in an exploratory and innovative manner, particularly in the subjects of Norwegian and mathematics in kindergarten education. We collaborate with our kindergarten teacher students and the field of practice in co-creating playful teaching methods. This collaboration enhances students' competence in play within the domains of Language, text, and mathematics, while also revitalizing kindergarten teacher training through innovative teaching approaches. This project on teaching design helps establish structured practices for ensuring teaching quality and, specifically, improving students' learning outcomes through play-based instruction. The co-creation process follows the methodology of "An Exploration and Pedagogical Innovation Laboratory" (EX-PED-LAB), which enables the organization of teaching in a way that empowers students and allows them, together with university teachers, to further develop games and learning using new innovative methods. The PlayForsk project is a part of WP5 within the EX-PED-LAB project and contributes to the third research question by examining how the EX-PED-LAB methodology can enhance play-based teaching in an exploratory and innovative manner in kindergarten teacher training.

Method

This is a teaching design project inspired by Gudiksen and Skovbjerg's (2020), where the EX-PED-LAB methodology is used to co-create in teaching and learning processes. Data is collected in connection with the planning, implementation, and evaluation of workshops related to teaching about play in accordance with principles of collective ethnography. Several methods will be used to investigate this: audio recordings, questionnaires, focus group interviews, and observations.