LTA Connect: Compassion Play: supporting mental wellbeing via compassionate, contemplative and playful pedagogies

Session Outline

Session Slides | Session Recording

Session Outline

This presentation shares some examples of Julia Reeve's practice involving a combination of compassionate, contemplative and playful pedagogies in various educational settings. The learning and teaching tools discussed will include adaptations of the LEGO® Serious Play® methodology and other innovative tools such as Reframing and Swollage. All of these share a multisensory, hands-on approach, fostering reflection, social connection and self-awareness. The application of these approaches across diverse educational contexts will be discussed, and evidence of the learning and wellbeing benefits provided.

Although Julia's practice is emphatically analogue in nature, she will discuss how these tactile teaching approaches can be adapted for an online learning environment. Further reading and resources to inform your own practice will be included.

Presenter

Julia Reeve

Julia Reeve is a National Teaching Fellow based in Leicester who works in a variety of educational settings including Further, Higher, prison and community education. She has intertwined her focus on the wellbeing of learners, awareness of learning differences and expertise as a LEGO® Serious Play® facilitator to develop innovative, inclusive tools that embed mental wellbeing into the curriculum.

Her practice focusses on building confidence, connection and creative thinking via imaginative, multisensory learning including LEGO® Serious Play®, collage and drawing. Her background in fashion design informs her teaching philosophy, which combines a constructionist ‘Thinking with the hands’ approach with compassionate pedagogy. She is particularly interested in emotional aspects of learning, and her practice focuses on the development of self-awareness and empathy, supporting social connection and wellbeing through playfulness and creativity.

She shares her pedagogic practice via publication, conference contributions and social media, regularly blogging about her work via her Compassion Play blog. Her most recent publication, “Compassionate Play: why playful teaching is a prescription for good mental health (for you and your students)”, makes the case for the more reflective and contemplative aspects of playful learning as a way to support positive mental wellbeing.

Julia’s personal and professional experience of the impact of mental health issues informs her teaching philosophy, as does her passion for inclusive learning. Her work is informed by a childhood love of imaginative play and a fascination with making things by hand, whether drawings, collages or LEGO models. Creativity and reflection are central to her practice, and she has developed a range of innovative, multisensory pedagogic tools that can be adapted to a variety of disciplinary and learning contexts.

Learning and Teaching Enhancement Strategy Values

To Book

Please email lta@uhi.ac.uk to book a place on this event.

Accessibility

We want to make this a positive experience for all participants and hope we have met everyone’s needs in joining this event. If you have particular access needs please contact us at lta@uhi.ac.uk so we can work together to get you as good an experience as we can.

Privacy

Please read our policy on how we treat any personal information collected in relation to our events:
Data Protection Statement for Events