Re-thinking my degree in the workplace: Intergenerational Play
Over the last few months, following the completion of my BA in English Literature in June 2019, I’ve spent some time intermittently working for a company which specialises in manufacturing outdoor musical instruments.
The role has been evolving and flexible, but most recently I’ve been tasked with writing some white papers for the company’s knowledge base. One of these - my favourite - focused mainly on the benefits of incorporating music-making into intergenerational activities, therapies and play - and the positive effects on all parties of intergenerational play itself.
I spent the last of my university days testing out some experimental (and often non-literary!) theory, and unpicking some of the ethics of pedagogical structures in Higher Education. These activities were inspired partially by a final year English module I took called ‘Contemporary Literature’. What I noticed in my new workplace, whilst collecting research for the white paper, was that some of this earlier thinking was cropping up again.
My third year module, at times, had demanded a rethinking of much of the invisible architecture that comes with studying at university level. There was a portfolio task, for example, which required an imaginative total rewriting of the module itself, and thus, I guess, an interrogation of what we individually considered to be worthy of studying as literature. Doing this assessment prompted a huge revision of my own inherited understandings of power and authority in the undergraduate setting, not least the rejection of notions of academic 'rightness' and 'wrongness'. The process massively unsettled the (assumedly) ‘fixed’ knowledge hierarchies that had so centrally informed how I participated in previous experiences of academic ‘learning’.
The curiosities that emerged from this assessment, among other things, set me on a journey of reading and engaging with progressively weirder, more offbeat and playfully, deliberately rebellious critical theory and thinking. Some of this thinking even snuck its way into my undergraduate dissertation, and has continued to inform my writing and thinking in the world of work.
Doing this assessment prompted a huge revision of my own inherited understandings of power and authority in the undergraduate setting
By way of example: recently, I have returned – somewhat accidentally – to the work of anti-Humanist Professors of Education Joanna Haynes and Karin Murris. In their collaborative article on ‘intra-generational education’, the two make a brilliant case for the fruitfulness of playing and learning across generational boundaries. They offer a radical point of departure from normative educational (and social) structures which tend more to keep children, adolescents, adults and the elderly safely and firmly in their respective boxes. Among other vivid observations and provocations, the two global scholars cleverly articulate the perils of this kind of binary division. The critique applies equally to educational structures both at university and in more conventionally elderly or child-centric playing/learning environments:
“Binaries produce relations of power in that categories on one side of the binary are granted power over other categories, in a hierarchically structured understanding of the world mediated by normative judgements of what is more or less valuable according to anthropocentrical criteria of their measurement.”
I would have almost certainly drowned in the whirlpool of inversions in such experimental thinking prior to completing my degree. But now, I find such work profoundly inspires my practical, embodied thinking in the workplace. By providing a theoretical grounding for the positive effects of intergenerational musical play, Haynes and Murris - and the theorists they engage with - have established a zone of crosshatch, for me, between the university environment and the worlds of work, music, agelessness and play.
Studying at Exeter Penryn enabled unconventional and marginalised learning to inform my work in the post-University world
Looking forward, I am so excited and inspired by how studying in the way I have at Exeter Penryn has enabled unconventional and marginalised learning practices to go on to inform post-University education in the world. And, further afield, the knowledge processes I tried out now can play a genuine role in the formulation of practical corporate thinking in business and advertising. So too – and I would argue, even more crucially - this knowledge plays a part in the establishment of meaningful, educational intergenerational relationships, both inside and beyond the classroom.
