Eric Mazur:
Welcome to the Social Learning Amplified podcast, the podcast that brings us candid conversations with educators. We're finding new ways to engage and motivate their students inside and outside the classroom. Each episode of Social Learning Amplified will give you real life examples and practical strategies you can put into practice in your own courses. Let's meet today's guests. Thank you for joining us today for this episode on Empowering Active Learning in the Social Learning Amplified podcast series. I'm your host Eric Mazur, and our guests today are Dr. Sharon Lauricella and Dr. Keith Edmunds. Thank you both for being here today.

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Sharon Lauricella:
It's a pleasure. Eric. Thank you for having us.

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Eric Mazur:
Thank you both also for participating in the Perusall book event that ended recently. I'm just so happy to have an opportunity to follow up today and discuss your book, Ludic Pedagogy: A Seriously Fun Way to Teach and Learn. I just love the idea of fun and learning. But before we dive into the book, let me start by telling you a bit about our guest, Sharon Lauricella is the inaugural teaching scholar in residence at Ontario Tech University in Otawa, Ontario, Canada. She holds a position as full professor in the faculty of social science and humanities and is a scholar of communication and scholarship of teaching and learning. Sharon holds a doctoral degree from the University of Cambridge. That's not my Cambridge, Massachusetts, but the UK Cambridge and a BA from Wheaton College, which is actually in Massachusetts not very far from where I am now. A Canadian with Italian and American roots.

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Sharon will always cheer for the Red Sox and hope that our listeners won't hold that against her. I certainly won't. Sharon, she's recognized for teaching excellence having been awarded the Ontario Tech Teaching Award twice in 2007 and in 2012, the faculty teaching award also twice, 2010 and 2019, and the Tim McTiernan Student Mentorship Award in 2020. She loves being a faculty member, not least because it's way easier than being in graduate school. That was hard. Keith Edmunds hold degrees in psychology, rural development, rural studies and business, and tells me that he has yet to determine the definite scholarly trajectory, which I'm sure is a good thing. After being awarded a PhD from the University of Guelph and an MBA from Laurentian University, he joined Brendan University in Canada as an assistant professor of business administration. Together, Sharon and Keith wrote the book on Ludic Pedagogy published by Roman and Littlefield in March last year.

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I love, already mentioned this, how your book advocates for having fun and positive experiences in the college classroom and how fun and learning may not be mutually exclusive. In fact, I have tried very hard to make the learning more fun for my own students. But 10 years ago, to give you a little background there, I started a completely team and project-based course to teach introductory physics to pre-meds and engineering students who typically don't want to learn physics. And the project was really there to promote intrinsic motivation to give a higher goal to the learning. So it's not just the abstract learning goal of learning physics, but a more interesting goal of doing a project. And I try to add to the projects a component of social good or empathy and the students are having fun. I wish I could show you a picture of the students in the class, but they're having actually fun learning.

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And I remember from you can see them with smiles in the classroom, and I remember the very first year that we taught this when the course was still an unknown on campus with 35 students. Meanwhile, it's grown to 160, but it's another story. I remember that about two weeks into the semester, a number of students came to me and they said, we're having a lot of fun, but we don't think that we're learning anything in their mind. Having fun meant you couldn't really be learning because typically when you're learning, you're under stress, you're cramming. And the fact that they were freed of that feeling of stress told them, no, I'm not learning. Now, I'd like to get back to that later on in this conversation, but before, since we may have many listeners who are not familiar with your book, could you explain what you mean by ludic pedagogy or actually the model that you promote in your book?

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T. Keith Edmunds:
Sure. The idea of the Ludic Pedagogy model, it's based on the idea that if similar to what you were talking about, if we enjoy ourselves, but in our case, starting with the instructor, if we enjoy ourselves while we're teaching and if students can enjoy themselves while they're learning, then the learning's going to be more effective. Students want to be there and they want to learn. So the model's sort of built on four pillars. The first one is fun and that's your intrinsic motivator, the thing that gets students to want to come to class to participate, to learn, right? It's not the grade at the end, it's the fun that they're having. So that's the motivator. Play is the activity pillar of the model, and that's the things that we do in class. It's not the traditional sage on the stage or the chalk and talk that students.

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That's a really passive kind of learning for students play is we've often said it's active learning because that tends to be more politically correct in the university. If I'm doing active learning, that's okay, but if I'm playing in the classroom, that might not be okay. So play we can roughly equate with active learning, and again, it's the things that students do as part of their learning. The third pillar is the playfulness, and that's the attitude and that's the way that both students and faculty approach the course. It incorporates ideas like creativity and curiosity, having a sense of humor being fun, loving those kinds of ideas. It's the attitude that we bring.

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And I want to clarify this early on because it's often some pushback that we get on this model. It's not silliness for silliness is sake. It is about being willing to play because play without playfulness becomes a chore. So if we're going to have students play, there has to be a sense of playfulness, otherwise it's a task, it's just something else they're doing. And then the last pillar is positivity, and that's the effect. And for the people that are developmental psychologists, they're not going to like what I say here, we're going to equate affect with emotions here. It's the emotional bent of the model and it's about looking at the course contents through a positive lens. It's seeking to understand, it's seeking to empathize, it's having a solutions orientation, those kinds of things. And it's important to make a distinction between this positivity pillar and just being happy because there's lots of course content that might be covered that you don't want to be happy when you're talking about genocide or race relations or sexual harassment, all sorts of terrible things that get covered in university courses. We're not saying be happy when you're talking about it, but if you can approach it with that solutions orientation, that empathy, that sense of understanding, that's what we mean by positivity. And in a nutshell, that's ludic pedagogy, fun, playfulness, and positivity.

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Eric Mazur:
Great. So I would like to perhaps add to that by asking you two sort of follow up questions. One is, how did you two create this model, but also what are some specific examples? How can we make it a little bit less abstract for our listeners?

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Sharon Lauricella:
Sure. I can take that, Eric. The question about how we created the model, and that's actually a fun story. In fact, Keith and I actually met on Twitter. This is when Twitter was cool and Twitter was still the place to be before it caught on fire and became a cesspool. But these were the cool days of Twitter. It was 2020, the pandemic was raging in the summer of 2020. What Keith tells me is he was hanging out in his backyard reading books as academics do. This was after the whole emergency online teaching where everyone was just scrambling to move everything online and it was kind of like a stop gap period. And we were edging into the time where a lot of classes were going to be online and we actually had to know what we were doing. There was no more excuse of like, oh, we're in panic mode.
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So everyone was talking about all this new technology and this new tool and that new tool and this new way of doing things and how about this and how about that, which was really helpful and good. But Keith threw out this tweet that said, I wonder if anyone has thought about any of these tools or techniques and how much fun they're going to be. And the stars must have aligned because I ended up seeing that tweet and I called it the best tweet ever. And from there, Keith and I became friends, we direct messaged, then we met on Zoom, and then I became friends with his wife, and now Keith is coming to my wedding this summer and it's a whole thing. So it all started through social media, but we had this idea that we're stop gapping all of this teaching with the latest and greatest tool and the shiny thing and the pedagogy needs to come first. So we kind of bonded over that. And then we said, what do we need more of in this dark time when we're all really doing, our best students are doing our best faculty's, doing our best staff is doing their best. So what did we need? And we talked extensively about how we could make this better and fun and play and playfulness, positivity, all kind of aligned for us. And then we said, okay, let's make sense of this. And we created the model from there.

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Eric Mazur:
I see. And it'd be great to have one concrete example of something you have each done in your classes the old way and the new fun way.

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Sharon Lauricella: Sure.

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T. Keith Edmunds:
I don't know about the old way. I mean,

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Eric Mazur:
You've always been fun.

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T. Keith Edmunds:
I've always been fun. The one example that I most often use in my classes is my negotiations class. So I teach in business and negotiations is a skill that a lot of students need to have. And so I do a lot of role plays. It's an integral element of the course. I teach the concept in the first half of the class and the second half of the class, they essentially practice it. They're given a scenario, they're given their roles. And even in the simple ones, you're buying a car, you're selling the car, here's the information you have. Students have a lot of fun with that and they really get into their roles. And then there's some that are a little bit more out there in the lesson about how to deal with cross-cultural issues. For example. It would be really problematic to assign somebody a cultural role for a culture they don't belong to.

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We would get into all sorts of issues that would get me hauled in front of HR and just be problematic in all sorts of ways. So what I do is I have a role play where they play different alien races, and so they're buying and selling a spaceship and they're given the characteristics of their aliens culture. And it's quite different from anything that the students are familiar with. And so they're given this in advance. And so when they come into class, students have no idea what's going on, which is kind of the point because they're dealing with a culture that they're unfamiliar with. They think they understand, but they're given false information. And so I had student look at me the last time we did this and pleading in his eyes, how do I make this person understand without describing my culture? And that's not something that most of us are able to do anyway, so it is lots of fun.

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And students I hear years after that they've graduated that that's the course they remember because it was fun. It's stuff that they did. And so that's a concrete example of play. And I can give you another one, and it's a very small example, but it serves an important purpose is Monday through Thursday, I wear a tie to work, but it's always a novelty tie. It has cartoon characters or the Mona Lisa on it. It is never just a regular patterned tie. But the important thing is that it serves as an indication of my playfulness. So because I'm wearing a tie, that's an indication of my source of power and I'm the guy in charge. But because it's a silly tie and I don't draw explicit attention to it, but it allows students to recognize that I do have that willingness to have levity and have fun in class.

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Eric Mazur: Great.

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Sharon Lauricella:
I can give you an example actually of what I'm going to do Monday, and it's something that we're going to do right in class. This is a really contemporary example for you. I teach a course in communication and conflict because I'm in communication and digital media studies. So we're talking about communication and conflict. And one of the things we're going to talk about on Monday is how to navigate when you get frustrated. And this is a direct follow on to Keith's story, but there are a variety of ways that students might say they respond to being frustrated. But one of the things that we're going to do on Monday is I'm going to ask all my students to fold a paper crane. So I have origami paper. Everyone's going to get a paper piece of origami paper, and then they can fold the paper crane in any way they want.

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They can go on YouTube and follow directions. They can look at still instructions. They can even work with somebody else in a group on YouTube or in a group with a still or a group. They can work with someone who knows how to do it, and that person can show them, but the student actually has to fold it themselves. So students love this exercise because it moves from the theoretical to the practical, right? Like, oh, I would do this or I would do that. But then you're faced with doing something that you're not familiar with. I don't know what to do here. And so what are your help seeking strategies? How do you deal with your own confusion, these kinds of things? And the thing I love about this exercise too is that it gets students moving around. They're not just stuck in one spot. So they might move their computer to sit with somebody else, they'll switch spots in the room, they'll get up and sit beside somebody that might help them. So this exercise we're going to do on Monday, and I'm so excited to do it because I find that what students always do is they save that crane. And I've had messages from students a decade later saying, I got a new job. Here's my paper crane up on my bulletin board. So that makes it really fun too.

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Eric Mazur:
I bet that sounds a lot of fun. Now, you talked about some student reactions, but as I alluded to earlier, sometimes students connect learning with suffering rather than learning with fun. How have they been reacting more generally? Also, I could see some students in your class keys feeling pushed a little bit out of their comfort zone, right? Because they need to enact. I mean, they might not be willing to even sort of step into the limelight and act like an alien selling a spaceship. So does this work for all students? Are there some students who resist this and feel uncomfortable?

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T. Keith Edmunds:
Yes, absolutely. And the same kind of thing happens in my leadership class. Part of the class is students are expected to enact the role of a leader at some point in the course. And in a lot of those things, for the more introverted students, for example, they feel, I don't want to say put upon, but pushed out of their comfort zone certainly to do those kinds of things. But it's in the very first class I say, you can't learn these things just by me talking about them. I could teach it. I could teach you about negotiations, I could teach you about leadership. But unless you actually engage in the activity, you're not going to internalize it. It's not going to become a skill that you can grow and use. And I've never had a student drop the class after that morning right at the start. And by the end they'll recognize that yes, I could have tried harder, put myself more into the role, but they're always taking something useful away from those lessons.

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Eric Mazur:
‍Yeah, I mean, what you just said, Keith is so true for any form of active learning. I mean learning really in general, learning is not a spectator sport. You have to roll up your sleeve and do things. It keeps surprising me even after for more than 30 years, having beaten the drum of active learning how difficult it is to unseat this notion that in college you learn by listening, not by doing. It's like moving a mountain. Now we've mainly focused on the students, but it seems that you too are having more fun in class.

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Sharon Lauricella:
We sure are. I absolutely am. I look forward to going to school every day. I look forward to seeing what's going to happen. And I can tell you a story, Eric, about what happened when I first started using perusal, and it was years ago because I've been using it for a number of years now. And I remember telling students that we were going to use this platform that's going to make reading more social and interactive. And I had never used it before, but I hadn't told them that yet. And I said, has anyone used perusal? No hands, no nothing. And so I thought, okay, I had a split second in my mind. I wasn't going to be like, okay, well this is how it works. And the first thing I actually said was, okay, this is awesome because I haven't used it either. We're going to figure this out together.

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And then everyone started laughing and I was just like, okay, this is where we need to be. We need to be on this level where the instructor is not the omniscient one. And learning, as you say, is not a passive thing for me or for my students. So in that moment I thought, okay, I've got this kind of interlude where I can connect with students and say, I'm exactly like you. We are all going to figure this out together. And I had a lot to figure out. They had a lot to figure out. And toward the end of the term, we did it. And it was such a great experience because I let go of that, oh, I have to know what I'm doing thing. And I said, okay, perfect. Nobody knows what they're doing. Awesome. This is the best.

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Eric Mazur:
And Keith, you too seem to be having a lot of fun in your classes.

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T. Keith Edmunds:
Yeah, I mean, as I tell my students, life's too short to work a job you hate. So if I wasn't having fun, it'd be time to find another career.

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Eric Mazur:
You find that creating an environment, a more fun learning environment for your students brings back that happiness and fun to yourself too?
T. Keith Edmunds:
I think so. I come at it the other way. I think if I'm having fun, the students are more likely to have fun. I see. You can't make it fun for the students if you're not having fun yourself.

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Eric Mazur:
I see. So having, I'm sure that by now many listeners are thinking, how can I have more fun in the classroom? So is this something that requires sort of an innate skill or is this something that you can actually learn how to be fun?
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Sharon Lauricella:
Me?

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T. Keith Edmunds: Go ahead.

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Sharon Lauricella:
I can take that one. I think it's actually a little bit of both. I think you have to have a little bit of a fun heart. And quite frankly, I don't know anyone who doesn't, right? Everyone's got a little bit of that funness in them or people I hang out with anyway, so I think you can learn it though. And I think now that I'm reflecting on this question, I think the early part of my career, some of my fun was quashed, right? I went to University of Cambridge in England, very intense graduate experience where it was very narrow and you had to do the right thing in the right way. And then started a tenure stream position where I had to jump through all the hoops, and then once I became associate professor, I'd already been conditioned. And then it was only then that I started thinking, wait, I actually can do things a little bit differently.

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I don't have to do it the way I've been taught. I don't have to teach the way I've always been a student. So there were a few key things that I did initially that I still do. And one of them is pretty much every 30 minutes if students have been sitting in the same spot, I do something so that they move around. And it sounds really simple, but it gives you the bandwidth to do something a little bit different, an activity, ask a question, ask students to talk to each other by moving around the room, these kinds of things. So I look at my prep for the day and I think, okay, if students are going to be sitting in the same spot for more than 30 minutes, we've got to get them moving around.

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Eric Mazur:
I see. I see. As are sort of approaching the end of this episode here, what advice would you give to people who are contemplating right now? How can I incorporate funding into my classes? What kind of simple one thing that might help them over the threshold?

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T. Keith Edmunds:
Very easy. Try something, anything. And if it works, great, refine it in the next iteration. If it doesn't work, refine it in the next iteration. And it can be an activity, it can be a joke at the start of class. It doesn't matter. Just something in one of those four pillars, fun, play, playfulness, and positivity. Just try something. And that's the thin edge of the wedge.

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Eric Mazur:
Nice. Sharon, do you have something to add there?

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Sharon Lauricella:
Sure. I think some people when they're learning about our model, think that you have to have fun playfulness and positivity all at the same time, but you don't. You can just take one of those aspects and weave it into your lesson plan or a reading or any kind of event or material that you have in class. And I think the moving every 30 minutes is key. And the other thing I think that is really fun is to try new technology. I use new technology all the time. I've tried Figma, I started with perusal, I've stuck with it. I've tried meant to meter anything. And the students will be like, you're always trying something new. And somebody said that to me last week and I said, well, yeah, isn't it fun? And that's part of how students learn when they get to work. They're going to always be trying new technology, and it trains your mind to learn new things quickly. So I'm always trying new crazy things. And I think if I model that, students are more open to do it themselves.

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Eric Mazur:
So let me end with one sort of reflection that I have here. I once invited a game designer to a series of talks that we give in education at the School of Engineering where I'm on the faculty because I was hoping to learn more about gaming and fun. I mean the two are related, but how you could incorporate game design into learning. And one of the very first questions that this person who was from the D school at Stanford, if I recall correctly, said, surprised me tremendously. She asked actually, what is it that makes games so addictive? And most people had a lot of trouble articulating their ideas there. And she said, what it is, and this is one of the most basic design principles of game design, is you want to add the learning of a skill. It's the learning that makes the gaming fun.

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You want to challenge people to learn something in order to get to a next and then offer a reward for that learning. And I was thinking, gee, I'm inviting this person to see how I can build in gaming and funnel into learning. And she's telling me that gaming is fun because of the learning. So there's some kind of very tight connection between learning fun and gaming. And as we know, if you observe small children, they love to learn. We're born sort of wanting to learn and the learning is fun. And then we go through education and the fun gets beaten out of the learning. And it only becomes fun again once we complete our formal education and engage in the lifelong learning and learn only for fun. So it's kind of a strange cycle, and I'm so happy to hear the two of you speak about bringing the learning the fun back into the learning in the college classroom. So before we conclude here, what are you working on next?

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T. Keith Edmunds:
Well, because the book we've been talking about, the Ludic Pedagogy book is very much the what and the why of our model. We're starting to work on a workbook that will help people with the how. So how do I take this model and apply it to my class in chemical engineering or accounting or music theory or whatever it is? How do I take this model and apply it to my course? And so the workbook will be a step- by-step, working through how you can incorporate fun, play playfulness and positivity into your course regardless of what it's

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Sharon Lauricella:
Absolutely. And we also are available to run workshops. We do hour long online or day long or half a day where if people for teaching learning centers, if people really want to take a deep dive into this, we're here for it. We can model the whole thing.

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Eric Mazur:
That's wonderful. So I would like to conclude by thanking you for listening to this podcast and thanking our guests, Sharon, Ella and Keys Edmonds. Thank you for joining us.

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T. Keith Edmunds:
Thanks for having us. It was fun.

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Sharon Lauricella: Thanks again, Eric.

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Eric Mazur:
Their book, Ludic Pedagogy, A Seriously Fun Way to Teach and Learn is available from the publisher. And Sharon and Keith told me that they might run another Peursall book event in the summer of 2024. Fingers crossed that you'll say yes to that. Now, for those of you who have not yet joined such an event, Perusall book events are author facilitated events where for a nominal fee, you get access to the book that is the subject of that Perusall book event. But at the same time, you'll be reading and interacting with other like-minded educators like me, as well as the authors through the Perusall interface. So I hope you will be joining the brainstorming on how to make learning fun. And to learn more about these events, go to perusall.com/engage. Finally, you can find our Social Learning Amplified podcast and more on perusall.com/sociallearningamplified altogether one word. Subscribe to find out about other episodes, and I hope to welcome you back on a future one.

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Social Learning Amplified is sponsored by Perusall, the social learning platform that motivates students by increasing engagement, driving, collaboration, and building community through your favorite course content. To learn more, join us at one of our introductory webinars. Visit perusall.com to learn more and register.