Towards a Joyful Pedagogy

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 By Dr Lauren White

Project Team: Dr Lauren White, Dr Will Mason, Dr Vicky Grant, Alison Romaine, Grace Cleary and Shona Tulloch 

Our project team explored joy and enjoyment in students’ higher education experiences. In this blog, we explore the key findings from the project and make suggestions for educators to work towards a joyful pedagogy. 


What is joy? Is it frivolous or juvenile to seek it, to crave it, to feel it? Do we give each other permission to find and feel joy? Is joy a personal, emotional, embodied and individual experience or is it an existential encounter, something much bigger than us? And crucially, why should we consider joy in higher education with these questions in mind?

A round pink sticker, with the words 'Community Over Competition' written on it, and drawings of mushrooms, and trees

Our project, supported by the Faculty of Social Science Education Fund, wanted to bring joy to the forefront of our thinking. Drawing upon the work of bell hooks, we know that as educators (and as lifelong learners too) that we must channel our efforts to ‘look, live, find and create spaces of joy’ (hooks, 2003: 169). That’s where we feel connected, where we feel part of something bigger and that our roles within that matter. 

Our student co-researchers led creative workshops centred around joyful learning. When asked about the meaning of joy, emphasis focused on human and non-human connections, community and essentially, independencies. When asked about higher education, little joy was to be found. Individualised, goal and achievement driven targets of grades, assessment and ‘what’s next’ stifled and squashed joy, with the exception of committed individuals and pockets of community that eased the load.
A round yellow sticker, with the words 'Our different forms of knowledge are valid and critical'
Now, it is of course not our intention here to de-centre the material realities of why we come to university or what happens when we leave, but rather to think about the process of learning and moving forwards a pedagogy of joy rather than one solely about achievement. So how do we as educators respond? As a team, we have created an accessible and hopefully achievable list of what we can do. These are:

  • Facilitate opportunities for engaged learning. 
  • Create opportunities for bonding to develop communities of learning. 
  • Recognise students as experts in their own right who bring valuable knowledge and experience into the classroom. 
  • Acknowledge that none of us know everything, and we all need support with something.
  • Build care into programme design. 
  • Enable learners to be co-creators and for them to value each other through collaboration. 
  • Support learners in developing collaborative skills. 
  • Support exploration, mistakes, gaps and safe failure.  
  • Embed rest and slowness. 
  • Permit students to make choices about what and how they learn. 
A round yellow sticker with a drawing of a squirrel, and the slogan 'Learning is a process' in green letters

We think it’s possible to move us towards a joyful pedagogy. We hope you do too.

To find out more, please visit the Joyful Learning site.

If you’d like to receive a copy of our ‘Takeaway Tangibles for Educators’ or a printed stickers of our research findings, please contact the project lead Dr Lauren White (l.e.white@sheffield.ac.uk) If any of the images are used in your own teaching, please let Dr Lauren White (l.e.white@sheffield.ac.uk) know and credit the project team (listed above) and illustrators Cherry Toosh. 
 
NB: Some of this blog post was originally published on the SMI news pages and iHuman at the University of Sheffield. Some of this text has been reproduced with the full permission of the author/s. 

To contact the Project Team, please click here