title: What’s fun got to do with it? A transdisciplinary, critical-reflexive and relational exploration of why fun matters to 9-and 10-year-old children in an English primary school
Creators: name: Dowdeswell, Emily
Publisher: name: The Open University
Year: 2024

description: Education has described fun in learning as a slippery concept, preferring to focus attention on a mix of loosely associated variables (such as games, humour, and play) and diverse outcomes (such as engagement, satisfaction and motivation among others), relying upon common-sense meanings to advance arguments. However, the field of Childhood Studies has problematised the hegemonic epistemes that shape common-sense ideas, showing childhood experience is intersected by complex relations of power. This has led to a call, in recent years, for more relational, critical approaches that engage with the materiality of children’s encounters. 
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This thesis explored seven children’s everyday experiences of learning in an English primary school to examine why fun matters to learning. Through a transdisciplinary, critical-reflexive, relational orientation the emergent, dynamic and complex relationships involved in fun and learning were materialised. A theoretical engagement with Sylvia Wynter and the lens of the <i>hybrid child</i>, and Rosi Braidotti and the lens of <i>sympoiesis</i>, developed more-than-human insights, supported by an arts-based research design, involving two creative workshops and five reflective conversations. Reflexive thematic analysis examined latent and semantic expressions of fun and learning in the data. The analysis identified seven themes, that highlight children’s generative attention to learning as many ‘small acts’ in the classroom; learning as emergent, mutable and adaptive; fun as daily tragicomedies and absurdist dramas that uplift spirits and bring joy; fun as a material and embodied counterpoint to boredom; children’s generative visceral susceptibility to their classroom; children’s preoccupation with classroom norms and ideals; and children’s spatial, material, and embodied experience of relations of power in the classroom. 
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Findings suggest the children enact fun, multimodal and multi-sensorial storytelling to collectively negotiate, enrich and make sense of classroom experiences. They further indicate that these children want more fun in their learning, suggesting pervasive boredom, not fun, is the greatest barrier to learning. The thesis found that children’s ecological responsivity signposts, communicates, and authors meaning, producing an enlivening spark that is crafted by children through stories and fun. Nevertheless, in a context where the learning experiences of many children are shaped by oppressive governing ideals, scarcity and the absence of fun, the children did not position fun as a magic switch that can solve the frustrations of learning. The findings develop a novel narrative for fun and learning in the classroom, rooted in the understanding that humans are inextricably hybrid, ecological beings. Emphasising mutable arrangements, regulatory mechanisms and more-than-human ecologies of meaning, practice, and matter, rooted in spatial paradigms and textured landscapes of power, the outcome of this research has implications for future educational practice in this country and beyond.