Andy Field is an artist, writer and curator based in London. He has created performance work on his own and with a variety of collaborators since 2007. He uses play and performance to create formally unusual projects that invite us to consider our relationships both to the spaces we inhabit and the people around us. Over the last decade this has manifested itself across a range of forms and disciplines, including street games, event scores, installations, interactive encounters, studio theatre shows and one-to-one performances.

For his Creative Fellowship, Andy collaborated with Maarten Koeners and Joseph Francis from the College of Medicine and Health, and Steph Comley from Techonology Enhanced Learning on the Univeristy's Penryn campus.

Together they explored 'The Playful University'; a project founded by Maarten and Joseph and funded by the Education Incubator, which aims to make the University of Exeter a place where learning is created and nurtured through joy, engagement and play, where learning to solve problems and overcome obstacles is a reward in its own right. The innovative aspect of this project is to develop and offer holistic educational practices for both students and educators – enabling individual and institutional play and playfulness to foster a culture that supports joyous, authentic transition to the co-creation of knowledge and skills, while counteracting a number of barriers to creativity and wellbeing.

Discover more about how their Fellowship developed in the film below.

The Creative Fellowship supported the exchange of skills and co-creation of knowledge to develop and foster play-based and playful educational practices.

Engaging in hands-on transdisciplinary collaboration, Andy contributed to play club meetings as well as creating a series of rogue slides, to be inserted into lectures at unexpected moments to add a touch of playfulness. These slides are fun and funny, but are also a deliberate means of prompting students to think consciously about the nature of lectures and lecturing, as well as their own learning.

Lectures For Nobody

Alongside the development of the rogue slides, Andy and Maarten also created 'Lectures For Nobody', a podcast exploring the changing nature of teaching and university during the pandemic.

Exploring both the complexity of online teaching as well as the nature of playfulnness within learning, the podcast also touched on questions raised about pastoral care for students and the struggles on both staff and students to continue to learn in such a challenging context.

You can listen to the full 25 minute podcast below (with captions).

This podcast led the pair to develop a series of three in-person 'Lectures For Nobody', a 20 minute pre-recorded lecture by Andy for one student in a large, empty lecture theatre. Providing the student with a space to reflect on their personal experiences of learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, this lecture also explored their relationships to the physical lecture theatres themselves, what these spaces mean to them, and how this might changed during the pandemic.

These lectures took place at the University's Streatham campus on Wednesday 28 April 2021, St Luke's campus on Wednesday 26 May 2021 and Penryn campus on Wednesday 23 June 2021.

The only surving record and documentation of these lectures are the notes taken by the students, beautifully and often playfully detailing their thoughts, experiences, hopes and concerns (which you can see below).

Lecture For Nobody

Streatham Campus, Wednesday 28 April 2021

Lecture For Nobody

St Luke's Campus, Wednesday 26 May 2021

Lecture For Nobody

Penryn Campus, Wednesday 23 June 2021

Further Collaboration

Maarten and Andy reamin in contact and are continuing to work together on various projects related to The Playful University including The Festival of Compassion, due to happen at the University of Exeter in November 2021.

In August 2021, they also collaborated on creating an online lecture about the 'Playful Academic' which was shown as part of an event with the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia. You can watch it below.