Cirrus@Austlit

'This paper investigates the role of play in university-based communities of practice. We consider play through the lens of Bogost (2016), as an exploration of the possibilities afforded by a structure or system. As educators and creative practitioners in a contemporary music university program, we draw on collaborative approaches that act as precursors to our students' future work in more naturally occurring social domains. Through the design of musical interventions that are intended to foster joint creativity, our students are encouraged to play with the possibilities available within a system, with the idea of a system being considered from a social standpoint as well as from a technical standpoint.

'Building on Lave and Wenger's (1991) conception of communities of practice (CoPs), we use Hoadley's (2012) definition of 'knowledge-building communities' to differentiate explicitly designed learning communities of practice from endemic CoPs. We consider knowledge-building as an experiential activity, and argue that play is an essential component of any knowledge building. We believe that fostering a 'whole of student', or holistic, approach in our teaching reinforces the transformational role that music can play. In this paper, we discuss an exemplar of this approach, Flow, a student-run, collaborative, interactive musical experiment. While this project did not overtly target pre-existing external communities such as with other 'community music' projects, we designed it as a pedagogical strategy to encourage inclusive and collaborative approaches, processes, and technologies as a normative aspect of our students' creative practice.'

Source: Abstract.