Summary

In this case study, we show how we implemented playful active learning to respond to the passive pedagogy that was dominating in our Postgraduate Certificate in Research Methods. We start by outlining the challenges we were experiencing in our multidisciplinary course context. Then we describe the Play-Doh method that we used in class. We conclude the case study by arguing that playful pedagogic approaches can help to transcend disciplinary boundaries and build inclusive communities in education.

Introduction

The Postgraduate Certificate in Research Methods at Southampton Solent University in the UK is a course designed for students who are embarking on a doctorate. Newly enrolled MPhil/PhD students, from all academic departments across the University, complete the programme during the first academic year of their studies. In the first 30 credit module, students are introduced to key transferable skills such as project management and planning. In the second 30 credit module, students develop their understanding of research design, impact and communication. The course is hosted by the University’s central Research Office but delivered by a teaching team of academics from across our departments of Art and Music, Business and Law, Social Sciences and Nursing, Science and Engineering, Film and Media, Sport and Health, and Maritime Studies. As such, students and staff from a broad range of disciplines come together in one classroom for postgraduate research methods education. In theory, this creates an inclusive course community for cross-disciplinary learning. In practice, it did not.

Despite the pedagogic opportunities that a multidisciplinary programme presents, some things were not working as well as they could.

Challenge one:

Sessions were typically being delivered in a didactic style with guest lecturers ‘parachuting’ into the programme and delivering content on a topic related to their research expertise. Students were passive recipients of their research methods education, rather than active learners.

Challenge two:

Interactions within the classroom mainly took place between the teacher and individual learners (often in the form of questions and answers). Students were rarely given opportunities to collaborate and learn from each other.

Challenge three:

Some students demonstrated goal-oriented attitudes towards the course rather than an intrinsic desire to learn about different methodologies and approaches to research. They also struggled to articulate their doctoral research plans to other learners outside their own disciplines.

Taking action

New course leadership of the PGCert Research Methods in 2023-4 created an opportunity to address these issues through a participatory action research project. Participatory action research is a qualitative research methodology that involves researchers and participants collaborating to understand issues and taking actions to bring about change (Dancis et al., 2023). To support new doctoral students in overcoming the challenges of studying in a multidisciplinary course community, an active learning activity was introduced in class. Seven out of a possible eight students took part in the new teaching and learning intervention (one student was absent on the day). The one-hour session was facilitated in a hybrid setup, with two students participating online and five students in person with the teacher on campus. Drawing on the principles of play (Hoflod, 2023; Koeners & Francis, 2020) students were asked to engage in the following three Play-Doh modelling activities (see figure 1 below):

The models were photographed, and verbal comments were audio-recorded for research purposes. After the session, students were asked to review the visual and verbal data they had generated and provide some further reflections, in writing, on the challenges and opportunities of studying in a multidisciplinary course. Narrative thematic analysis was undertaken within individual cases and across the whole dataset (Riessman, 2007). As part of the project, students were invited to take an active role in the analysis and writing process as co-researchers. The intention was to create a real-world interdisciplinary learning experience for the student researchers. This case study has been prepared by the Course Leader in partnership with the participating students. Ethical approval was gained from the Southampton Solent University Research Ethics Committee for its inclusion of illustrative visual and verbal data created in the project. All participants provided informed consent for their names to be included in the publication.

Making multidisciplinarity

Students worked individually to make and describe Play-Doh models that represent their research discipline and the knowledge that they hope their doctorate will produce. The outcomes of these activities are displayed in figures 2 -8 below (photographs all supplied by authors with participant’s consent):

Figure 2: Play-Doh models by Melissa Goss, PhD student in Psychology. Working title of thesis: A Journey into investigating Social Rejection: A Three-Part Study

So essential the basis of my project looks primarily at social rejection and like the thought processes behind social rejection. So to demonstrate that, I made two little blobs talking to each other and another little blob to be excluded. And then at the bottom here I put a broken heart to indicate social rejection can have correlations of a broken heart and physical pain. Which was kinda like the basis of doing my Masters project and something, a philosophy, that I want to carry forward throughout my PhD project as well.

The second image looks at more like cognition; the cognitive responses. So, I have done the brain which is kinda in a blueish grey colour because that’s the colour closest to grey that I could find. And these little purple blobs represent thoughts and the thoughts – these little purple lines here represent the thoughts being processed into like emotional and behavioural manifestations. And that’s kind of demonstrated through the difference in behaviour manifestations. I made two blobs and a little line between saying that there could be different reactions depending on the individual.

Figure 3: Play-Doh models by Velu Immonen, PhD student in Sports Science. Working title of thesis: The Concept of Muscular Strength and its Relationship to Muscle Size

It’s a mess but so is my thesis! [laughs] The first one was…. I hope it’s obvious – a muscle [laughs]. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. The thing I am interested in is how it produces force, how it is related to force products.

However, the second part was… the question itself is not so obvious. I draw on multiple sources and use data analytic techniques and kind of figure out how they all relate, if they do and erm if there is even a thing called strength. So I was meant to do something in the middle but I didn’t know what to do. I guess it is a moving target not necessarily a central thing that exists necessarily, but maybe some ‘data factor’ so to speak.

Figure 4: Play-Doh models by Nathan Ghann, PhD student in Education. Working title of thesis: They just don’t engage. Reframing learner engagement for success. A behavioural approach

So the first thing I noticed was the colours. I wanted to choose the right colour. Blue for me is very ‘Education’. Because blue means ‘safe’ and I feel like that is the basis of education – a very safe foundational part of life. But then I’ve got bars which erm could be grey but they’re black. And these are the structures that have grown out of education. So these are the ways that you have to do stuff. Then I had the purple on top as a roof. And the purple represented higher education or education aspirations and ambitions. And then it started to kind of fall down [laughs] and I thought ‘actually this is perfect!’ Like education has got all these aspirations that are almost like a weight – they can’t sustain or keep up. So I thought I’d leave it like that.

My second one is about learning engagement. So it was about this piece of Play-Doh that represents all the students and all the different people and taking almost a piece of them and putting it into these aspirations of higher education and swapping it out. So the aim of the data is to figure out ‘how do these pieces fit in one another?’

Figure 5: Play-Doh models by Sophiia deFaia, PhD student in Psychology. Working title of thesis: The weight of the matter is serious – an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis into the lives and experiences of people with Binge Eating Disorder

So my initial little piece – I started off by making a little brain. And I made it purple because that feels the most ‘brain-like’ to me because where it is Psychology-focused and everything I thought about that. But then it sort of occurred to me that’s not my entire focus. Obviously my focus is eating disorders so I made a little plate and some cutlery – that will fall apart if I pick it up! Erm so I loaded up this plate with loads of different things because the whole point of binge-eating disorder is that you over-consume, you have no sort of control over your consumption. So I have that sort of mound over this plate. So that is sort of what my research area is.

And this lovely [laughs] really, really odd-looking little model is the sort of collaboration between lived personal experience of the eating disorder and lived professional experience. So, the little lived person is blue. And my little lived professional clinicians that work with people with these eating disorders is in green. Because that sort of makes more sense to me sort of healthcare wise… And this [laughs]… this really weird little blue thing in the middle is the sort of knowledge connection between the heart of the lived person sort of being filtered over to the lived professional clinician. And that sort of personal experience and the sort of everything that this lived person has experienced will be fed through to the clinicians so hopefully they will have a better understanding both in mind and in heart. And that is supposed to be a little lightbulb. It looks like a mushroom! But it’s about that connection between the two of them and that sort of real understanding from the experience of the person who has experienced the disorder, filtering through to the person who works with them.

Figure 6: Play-Doh models by Sawsan Jaghsi, Postgraduate student in Biomedical Science. Working title of thesis: The Association between Vitamin K metabolism and miRNAs: Do miRNAs improve Vitamin K uptake and metabolism?

This is the discipline. I have made the seeds of a plant and I put it under the soil… this is the soil. And I have to water it to grow the tree. Which would be a useful tree. Which is related to health because it is orange… it is an orange tree. Some of the seeds haven’t grown. And some of the seeds have grown into beautiful flower plants. This is the aim of the journey – to finish [laughs]. And a butterfly comes and we can forget all in my point of view. Because I research cancer… if the butterflies and the flowers are comfortable because they land, it means relaxed and with no issues, no problems – no health issues.

Figure 7: Play-Doh models by Kush Varia, PhD student in Film. Working title of thesis: Mutating Movies: Genetics, Gender and Genre in Hollywood Cinema

I’m not very artistic [laughs]! I did a… I tried to make a film cell. Because obviously I’m working in the film cell discipline. It’s actually blank in the middle of the cell because I’m waiting to find out what the film might be – the one that I might be shooting in a metaphorical sense. Then for the second part I did erm… my thesis is looking at the representation of genetics. I tried to make a double helix which is really difficult. But I think it kind of comes together if you’re screening DNA I suppose. That’s what I was trying to say.

Figure 8: Drawings by Yoi Kawakubo, PhD student in Fine Art. Working title of thesis: Exposing The Imperceptible: A Practice-Based Investigation Into The Intangible Aspects of Nuclear Culture

So that’s the first question – this is the discipline. So this is kind of a horizon or a map. And a little ship here on the right-hand side is erm exploring the big folds that are supposed to be behind the end of the world where there is a great waterfall that leads into nothing. But I felt that it is an area that is expanding boundaries and definitions. So I definitely think all research does probably have this aspect, but I felt like art does have this characteristic of trying to be a discipline of trying to really find itself. So what is art? Or what is beauty? Whatever people think is art. So this, during the twentieth century, has been explaining. So I guess research could be said to be art and participatory art, exploration, activism interventions. So that’s my first one.

The second one is a bit more messy [laughs]! So it’s a drawing of erm…. For example, well it starts with kind of a landscape which is kind of captured in some ways that is later represented and grown into three financial charts, liquids, sounds, music, perfumes, speculative novels, letters, sounds, constellations and all the answers. And that’s it.

Students then worked together to agree, create and describe a metaphorical model that represents their multidisciplinary research community on the PGCert Research Methods (see figure 9 below):

Figure 9: Play-Doh model of the multidisciplinary course community

It is an Island with different patches of vegetation representing our research. And the purpose of each vegetation patch is to nurture humans. Some vegetation is for their brain and wellbeing, some for food and nourishment, some for collaboration and social acceptance, some are to heal, others are to make sure that their muscles and their bodies work properly, and some are to help with their thinking.

What worked?

Using Play-Doh modelling in our PGCert Research Methods brought several observable benefits which are summarised under analytical themes below:

1. Active learning

Play is a pedagogy for supporting students to actively engage in their learning (Toft-Nielsen & Whitton, 2017). Rather than passively receiving research methods knowledge in the classroom, the Play-Doh modelling activities helped our learners to become knowledge producers themselves – creating knowledge through the physical process of making. As James and Nerantzi (2019) argue, play is an innovative way to co-create knowledge amongst learners. It not only helps to dismantle traditional hierarchies between teacher and learner but also brings more active engagement to the learning experience. Indeed, we observed a noticeable increase in positive energy in the classroom during the Play-Doh making session with students moving around the learning space more freely and interacting with each other.

The students get out of their seats to grab the Play-Doh colours of their choice. Their enthusiasm is evident in their increased level of conversation and open body language. They joke and laugh as they acknowledge their shared vulnerability in the creative task, whilst busily working on finessing their Play-Doh models. (Dr Karen Arm – Senior Lecturer, extract from teaching diary)

At the end of the session, the students summarised their experience of the Play-Doh learning activities using words such as ‘immersive’, ‘active’, ‘engaging’, ‘enjoyable’, and ‘fun’ (see Figure 10 below).

2. Deepening understanding

Understanding how disciplines shape research is arguably a ‘threshold concept’ (Meyer & Land, 2006) in doctoral education. Once the threshold is crossed, students can more confidently situate themselves within their field and understand the original contribution their study will make. Our Play-Doh activities encouraged doctoral students to think about their research from its disciplinary position, deepening their understanding of the philosophical foundations of research. Discussing the Play-Doh models with each other helped individuals develop new and more sophisticated perspectives on their doctoral studies as the following student comments demonstrate:

Together, they [the Play-Doh models] gave me the thought that the research question itself is relatively ‘simple’, and on a surface level, we’re just looking at how muscle size related to force production (hence the concrete representation of a muscle). But on the other hand, it’s much more nuanced than that, and so many variables are at play… There are many angles we can look at, and all are interconnected somehow (hence the more abstract web). (Velu Immonen – PhD Student in Sport Science)

3. Articulating the abstract

The challenge of creating a physical object to represent an abstract idea can help students with expressing the not easily expressible aspects of their research (Arm, 2025; Stead, 2019). We found that the Play-Doh modelling activities helped learners critically reflect on and communicate their research in a way that they could not in words alone. Nathan Ghann (PhD Student in Education) described how ‘it forced me to communicate abstract ideas like “an institution” as well as “students” and who they are and/or might become.’

In this way, creative methods offer a way of going beyond the constraints of the spoken word in research education (Kara, 2015). Metaphorical modelling can help support students to verbalise their research more clearly and in simple terms for diverse and non-specialist audiences.

4. Inclusive teaching

Play-Doh modelling activities offer a multi-sensory experience to learners. As well as the tactile learning stimulated through physical touch and hand movements, other stimuli are activated – for example auditory (via discussion of models), visual (via the colours and appearance of the models) and olfactory (the smells of the Play-Doh). This multi-model learning is arguably more accessible to a broader range of learning preferences than single model lecturing methods of teaching (Varga-Atkins, 2024).

Our Play-Doh activities created a learning experience that is more personalised than transmissive styles of teaching since they allowed every student an opportunity to express their thoughts and ideas in a way that is meaningful to their individual PhD journey (Rossi, 2023). As with any pedagogy, it was important to make sure that the activities were designed to be appropriate for all learners, including those with additional support needs. Offering different options for engaging in the task further helped to support inclusivity. For example, students who were unable to attend the session in person, were supported to participate online with Play-Doh sent to them in advance. In the case of one student who was unexpectedly unable to attend in person (due to childcare needs), they were still able to join in all the activities using pencil drawing instead. Indeed, students appreciated the accessible approach to teaching as well as the opportunity to explore their research topics through an inclusive lens.

5. Community building

Play offers ‘potential for creativity, immersion, and ways of knowing, permeating disciplinary and professional boundaries’ (Kolflod, 2023, p. 478). Our Play-Doh modelling activities helped our students move beyond siloed thinking to consider ways that research transcends disciplinary boundaries. This was especially evident in the final activity where students modelled their multidisciplinary course community together. Reflecting on this, the students said: ‘It allowed me to be a part of the whole and see my research from a holistic perspective.’ (Melissa Goss – PhD Student in Psychology), and ‘it made my academic journey feel more like a teamwork, or a joint journey’ (Yoi Yawakubo – PhD Student in Fine Art).

Collaboratively creating a model of the course community not only built a stronger sense of community within the multidisciplinary group but also helped learners see how the knowledge created through their own research can integrate with others in their cohort. As Jacobs (2013, p. 224) argues; ‘disciplines are nodes in a remarkably vibrant web of scholarship’. Within each disciplinary node there are distinct practices towards the nature of knowledge, how knowledge is created and how it should be communicated. Using creative methods to evoke a reflexivity about these foundations of knowledge helps research students understand their own disciplinary positionality and avoid value judgements of others (Rossi, 2023). This arguably prepares students for a more inclusive interdisciplinary real-world of research.

Moulding the future

It is ironic that our PGCert Research Methods is about the activity of research yet learning had become predominantly passive on the course. Our action research project tackled this head-on by implementing Play-Doh modelling activities into the classroom. This kinaesthetic and playful approach to research education helped us develop a more inclusive course community for cross-disciplinary learning.

Central to the success of our Play-Doh activities was the low risk and failure associated with the educational activity (Whitton, 2018). By creating a relaxed and comfortable learning environment, we were able to take our students out of their goal-oriented comfort-zone and consider ways of making new knowledge together. This helped deepen their understanding of the disciplinary foundations of research and embrace the future possibilities of interdisciplinary working.

Going forward we will continue to use playful learning techniques with future cohorts to support our students at the beginning of their doctoral journeys. This will ensure that it becomes an embedded and sustainable part of our course pedagogy. Building a variety of different play activities into our research education curriculum will help develop student’s familiarity with the principles of playful learning whilst also retaining the novelty and surprise needed for its success.

Our experience has been that Play-Doh is a powerful pedagogy for promoting physical and active engagement in the classroom, collaboration with diverse others, and imagining interdisciplinary possibilities within research (Toft-Nielsen & Whitton, 2017). We hope that our case study encourages others to use Play-Doh modelling in their teaching and learning. It might just mould the future of your pedagogy.

Key takeaways

• Play-Doh modelling can be used in any discipline and with different cohort sizes. It helps build an inclusive course community.
• Play-Doh modelling supports students to critically engage with aspects of learning that are not easily expressible in words (for example, abstract and/or difficult concepts).
• Play-Doh modelling helps transcend disciplinary difference in the classroom and promote interdisciplinary learning.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all the students for engaging so enthusiastically in the Play-Doh modelling activities. Their openness to trialling a new playful pedagogy has helped mould the future of the PGCert Research Methods course at Southampton Solent University.

References

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About the authors

Sophiia de Faia, Melissa Goss, Velu Immonen and Yoi Kawakubo are doctoral students at Southampton Solent University in the UK. Their research interests span the disciplines of Psychology, Sports Science and Fine Art. Dr Karen Arm is a Sociologist of Education and Course Leader of the PGCert Research Methods.

Corresponding Author: Karen Arm, karen.arm@solent.ac.uk