Learning Teams

Let's Play in Portland!
 
Let's Play in Portland! We encourage each learning team to submit a panel proposal on your broad theme at the PNASA conference, April 26-28, 2007 in Portland, Oregon.  Proposals are due 1/31/07.

The fall retreat resulted in three tentative learning teams with a specific play focus.  Each group has a team leader and has set up their own email listserve so they may continue their learning team discussions.  This early formation and grouping is likely to shift and change as groups discuss their ideas.  Feel free to join another group or, alternatively, create a new one.  We suspect that some larger groups may splinter into subgroups around similar topics.  We’ll continue to update this information on the website to keep everyone informed (team leaders – please contact Debbie when significant shifts or developments occur in your learning team so I can update the site).  Good luck!

Team 1:  Humor & Play:   Cross-Cultural Status and Flatulence

Our group has created a research plan focusing on the use of humor as a socialization tool about bodies, gender, class and body function, with a focus on fart jokes. Our work asks what role the fart joke plays in telling us about our social status in our society. We are looking at this internationally and have divided the world up by cultural groups. Part of this project involves interviewing people about the use of humor as a socialization tool in their culture. We are going to create both a video as well as written works of our findings. We have developed our questions for the interviews and hope to get HAC approval soon.

 Our research thus far has revealed that this is a highly under researched area. Although this type of joke is something that every culture apparently knows about; little, if anything, has been formally written about this topic. We have also discovered that  the social response about what appropriate research, when it comes to this subject, is in itself apparently a violation of   the social taboos.

Email listserv: globalplay@uidaho.edu

Team 2:  Experiencing Play

The purpose of this project is to examine how sports, recreation, and play are experienced by participants, and to determine how specific demographic characteristics such as gender, culture, nationality, and ethnicity/race may impact those experiences.

Investigators:  Traci Craig, Grace Goc Karp, Rula Awwad-Rafferty

Team 3:  Teaching and Learning Through Play

The PlayTeach learning team is exploring play as a tool for teaching/learning specific, cross-disciplinary skills including these:  Extrapolation, active listening, remembering, comprehending, constructing and organizing data, storytelling, questioning, contextualizing, differentiating fact from opinion, deconstructing argument, logical reasoning, letting go of familiar, secure positions and being open to new points of view, awareness of unexpected consequences, ability to know self, take risks, in order to step outside self, self-reflective thought, awareness of audience, ability to separate belief from knowledge, observation, facilitation, reconciliation

Our group so far:  Candy, LT, Elsie, Maureen, Nick, Sheila

Our address: playteach@uidaho.edu

Team 4:  Resistance & Play: Sportsbetters’ Resistance to Gaming Legislation

Our research examines computer mediated communications of an online sports forum in terms of participants’ ethical sense making relative to this domain of play.  We first provide a historical context for the construction of illegality of this form of play sports betting and then analyze members’ responses to recent legislation to make online betting illegal in the United States as well as other moral dilemmas related to this form of play. We employ a constructivist model of how cultural practices are evaluated by members in the online sports forum and account for multiple concepts and ethics that individuals bring to bear in interpreting and evaluating their social reality.

Research Team:  Sandra Haarsager (supplying the history and content for gambling legislation), Debbie Storrs & John Mihelich (analysis of on-line discourse) and James French (undergraduate assistant working on analysis of on-line discourse).

Team 5: Play & Death

Email listserv: deathies@uidaho.edu
Team Leader: Jodie

Members:

1. Jodie
2. Melanie
3. Kevin
4. Britt
5. David
6. Jere

 Death & Play Topic Clusters

• Death and children
  • kids' fascination with death and dead things (stand by me, Candy's dead bird), death in children’s games
  • kids' fascination with violent play (Narrative death games like Killer, WWII games, cops & robbers, etc.; also fake machetes, knives, swords, bow & arrows, guns
  • death themes in juvenile/young adult literature (teen slasher books, Christopher Pike, Things that Go Bump in the Night, ghost stories, etc.)
• Representations of death in popular culture--video games, horror comics, popular music,  war games, war simulation (PeaceMaker thing)
• Death (metaphorical) of institutionalized play (recess, phys ed); Idaho is #4 in country for number of drownings--lack of municipal pools (opportunities for recreation/play? Does the death of (institutionalized) play result in playing with death?
• Risky (death-defying), or extreme deep play, across age/generations/culture (driving too fast, cliff-jumping, roller coasters, “chicken,” bungee-jumping etc); feelings of invincibility, rules & boundary-testing
• Death and entertainment, death in art, architecture (rhetoric of the imaginary), music: comedy/death movies (S.O.B., What About Bob?, Weekend at Bernie's, South Park (Kenny), Grand Guignol, Six Feet Under, B-comedy horror movies like Night of the Living Dead); tombstone art/play; eulogies, obituaries
  • Death as “theater”
  • Day of the Dead (Jodie's b-day), Carnival, Halloween
  • Staging death at funeral homes, murder mystery parties
  • Death/Murder/suicide as theater: Charles Manson, Timothy Leary, Hunter Thompson
• When play accidentally ends in death