Figure 1 Blistered palm from micro-teaching session by Tanya Noor. February 5, 2025. London College of Communication. Photo is author’s own.
We began our collective micro-teaching session by making blisters on our palms. Tanya, who teaches make-up and special effects at LCF, prepared her microteaching by handing out palettes of wax and paints, initially demonstrating to us the process of creating these grotesque wounds (fig. 1). In my own research I am interested skin and the openings of porous surfaces; and the act of making this wound filled me, and seemingly the group, with joy. This was followed by a session experimenting with different yarns and cords, making our individual interpretations of fabrics. Without the constraint of needing to develop a desired outcome, the session’s timed limitation was creatively freeing. I identified what I was missing and yearning for: play.
Transported to my own childhood classrooms, I remembered the tangible skills that I developed through touch-based learning. In my own session, I explored the scopic regime of modernity. As a concept and theoretical framework, modernity sets the foundation for modernization through a logic that privileges linear progress through rationality, sciences, and technologies. The framework is complicated, but I derive my understanding from decolonial scholars that see this as inextricable from coloniality (see Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). Modern development was driven by resource exploitation, genocide, and human enslavement, setting the foundation for world as we know it today, through the invention of racial capitalism, gendered inequalities, class disparities, able-bodism, and so on. Modernity sought to privilege the visual, losing sense of touch-based, emotional, and other knowledge systems (see Jay, 1988).
The feedback to my session was encouraging and illuminating. This session was adapted from methodological sessions I run on object analysis, thus it was helpful to receive feedback on the connection between experiencing objects and theory. Comments also noted the desire for the session to be longer as the information was quite dense, and the alienating potential of working with familial histories. In my own teaching practice, the family history component is one theory amongst several that are offered as frameworks to further explore, but it was a helpful comment nonetheless to highlight the need for inclusive sensitivities. As part of the Cultural Studies team, and contextual history/study component, my work is often framed as a theoretical component. However, I was a practitioner in my previous life, and I had forgotten how much creativity and play delighted me.
I conclude this reflection with a desire to investigate play in pedagogy. Importantly, how integral the role of this is to creativity in learning itself. While a survey of Google Scholar reveals research that explores the relevance of play in early childhood education, I aim to explore further the radical potential of the term. Perhaps otherwise known in its adult form of leisure, it seems to be an antithesis to the outcome-driven capitalist society of today.
Works Cited
Jay, M. (1988) ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ in Vision and Visuality. Ed by. Foster, H. Seattle: Bay Press.
Walsh, C., and Mignolo, W. (2018) On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.