Ludic Inquiries Into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education

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 Prendergast Discipline 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 AM Creative Writing, University of Melbourne