In this book we chart a series of classroom experiments that were first developed during the period of 2020–2021, a period now recognised as the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in educational contexts, as being instrumental to the most intensive digitisation of online learning globally.
The experiments that we chart were designed for a university course in creativity – a course that aimed to both make tangible the often intrinsic vernacular of creative processes, and at the same time, to reclaim the language and purpose of creativity from its misuse in increasingly instrumentalised and economically rationalised educational contexts.
The purpose was to put on the record the creative ways we aimed to hold the space as teachers – in physical and digital classrooms – for creative flourishing to still (and always) be able to happen. Time became a central integer in mapping what we wanted to achieve, and in naming the structural constraints which both catalysed and impeded our ambitions.
How to Play in Slow Time is a record of our discoveries and a toolkit that launches our experiments into new worlds and frameworks of practical possibility. This toolkit encompasses an expanded set of voices, perspectives, practices and knowledges.
Inside you will find nine chapters that explore a facet of creative thinking as well as touchstones that point to the social conditions and critical perspectives that anchor and illuminate it. You will also find creative exercises framed as ‘Invitations’ – provocations that are offered for you to encounter as part of your own teaching-making/making-teaching practices. Student voices support the Invitations with rich observations about how they challenge and why they work.
Practitioner Profiles interweave with the chapters to offer insights that are anchored in the specific forms of ‘frontline’ work that artists and creative thinkers so vitally centralise. The Practitioner Profiles included in this book (also available in our podcast series of the same name, see either https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28418735 or https://rss.com/podcasts/how-to-play-in-slow-time/) emphasise the importance of material, embodied and somatic thinking to diverse learning and making contexts.
This book can be read sequentially, or with the spirit of taking a meander through a set of ideas that are composite, emergent, continuously cross-feeding and not quite able to contain the joyous curiosity and discovery they nonetheless hope to chart.