Thinking with your Hands I: Academic Skills with Lego Serious Play
Full course description
For ancients like Plato and Confucius, and moderns like Johan Huizinga, learning must be playful if it is to be deep, and not remain at the level of mere technical-rational knowledge. It also needs to engage us physically, and not merely digitally, building neurological linkages between hands, eyes and brains that are associated with better recall and ability to synthesise and create new knowledge. This course does both. Using tools based on Lego® Serious Play® (LSP), it gets students to rethink their relationship with learning; learn practical skills to map and understand academic arguments; and design a research project using LSP.
Course objectives
The overall learning outcome is :
- to shift students’ practice towards "deep" learning strategies and away from "surface" ones.
There are three subsidiary outcomes that get to the overall goal:
- to reflect on the nature of knowledge, and students’ and scholars’ relationship to it
- to be able to visualise the steps of an academic argument, both in readings and in their own work
- to plan their own research project using LSP.
Prerequisites
This is a 2000 level course with no prerequisites. It is a pilot depending on a pending an exteral funding decisions, as such places in the course are limited and a special selection procedure applies.
If you would like to join this skills training you need to apply for it by filling in the application form on the intranet (UCM Students). Part of this form asks you to elaborate on your motivation to follow the skills training. Do so in consultation with your academic advisor. The motivation should cover an explanation as to how participating in the project adds to your curriculum, why you think you are well prepared to follow the project and an overview of the relevant courses that you took. The application needs to be submitted in advance of the course registration deadline.
Given that the number of available spots is limited, the course coordinator reserves the right to select the students that are deemed most suitable. It will be communicated in a timely manner, but no later than 6 weeks before the start of the skills training, whether the application for the skills training was successful. If access to the skills training is denied, then you will be allocated to a backup skills training. Please indicate the backup skills training on your course registration form.