What if the whole teaching experience were more like a playground than a battlefield? What if we not only played with ideas and thoughts but with our students and ourselves as educators? I believe that the teaching and learning experience can be one that brings life, wholeness, resistance, and embodied liberation when we incorporate more intentional playfulness. From start to finish, if we incorporate more womanish modes of play, we can curate a clearing space that allows for more wholeness and freedom. For example if we played with our syllabi and made them into comics or storyboards how much more expansive could that be? What if we curated assignments with modalities that reflected more care not only for the students but for us as educators such as podcasts, vlogs, poems, songs, games etc? Not only would students be able to connect more of who they are with the work, but as educators we often get to see more of students this way and we might actually enjoy the assessment part of it as well. What if we practiced ungrading? What if we started classes with breathing exercises? What if we played games together during class? What if we danced together in class? What if we dared to care for ourselves in the curation of our courses?
In this session I will bring Alice Walker, Stacey Floyd-Thomas and Lakisha R Lockhart-Rusch into conversation to curate a womanist playground. I want to turn the entire presentation room into a Womanist Playground and invite people to not only hear about the benefits of a womanist playground, but to actually experience the wholeness, resistance, and embodied liberation. We will engage in discussion after and create strategies for implementation.
The need for the curation of a womanist playground in classrooms is great; it can aid in teaching, being, learning, and existing across difference through inviting persons to critically remember and reflect, deliberately question, creatively and collaboratively imagine, and live into emancipatory hope. This critical consciousness stems from and is deepened by womanist thought’s invitation to embrace self, engage in culture and community, embody God’s love, and to enkindle the world. In this session we will explore and engage in womanist modes of play and strategize how academics can practice and experience more wholeness, solidarity, resistance and embodied liberation, in the classroom, through curating a womanist playground.