PLAYGROUND launches on February 10th

This series of workshops (4 two-hour sessions over the Spring and Summer terms 2011) is centered around improvisation activities and techniques which will allow early career researchers to reflect on their own performance of teaching, presenting and researching.

The sessions take place once a month, and every session is structured around improvisation exercises and discussion.

Teaching puts you in a situation where you don’t know what you’re doing. Experienced teachers can embrace and build on this element of un-knowing; in other words, they improvise. This series of workshops will offer postgraduate students improvisational strategies to feel secure in situations of not-knowing. Throughout the series of workshops we will engage with questions such as: how do you project confidence and how do you create an environment in which students are encouraged to think creatively?

PLAYGROUND is not about answers – but it will allow us to reflect on how to build a group, how our performance, and the performance of the students, radically change the teaching situation, and how we, as speakers (lecturers, conference speakers, and discussion leaders) engage with groups. We hope to give new teachers to the confidence to not know (confidently)!
Last, but not least, PLAYGROUND is a platform for postgraduates to get out of their library chair, move about, have fun and indulge in some cake.

Term plan:

Thursday 10th of February: ‘What is a seminar?’ Practicalities of building a teaching environment
Thursday 10th of March: Performing teaching
Thursday 7th of April: Creativity and its role in the university
(Thursday 12th of May: Provisional date)

We will meet at 6pm, Strand Campus, Norfolk Building, room 332 (American Studies Department)

Please RSVP to either Maria Damkjaer (maria.damkjaer@kcl.ac.uk) or Philippe Roesle (philippe.roesle@kcl.ac.uk) or get in touch if you have any questions.

We hope to see you there!