Learning in Playful Environments

Jabiz has been trying to explain to me why football matters . And I understand, a bit, and respect the passion, a lot, but I'm still not sure I'm persuaded. Flickerd [CC BY-SA 4.0] My vision is clouded, of course, and explaining the history of my relationship with football will help explain why I raise an eyebrow when Jabiz starts talking passionately about the latest game results. In both the US where Jabiz grew up, and Australia where my values were formed, football, in its different codes, is god. Almost literally I suspect. For many young boys in our cultures, the Saturday afternoon ritual of sitting with Dad and watching the game is an induction into the divine, a process of hero worship where the gods perform marvels and set the standards to which we aspire. My childhood relationship with football was a little different. I grew up in a little country town where my father was the only doctor. Saturday mornings he did his morning clinic and in the afternoon we would be out...

These three powerful books have in common a concern for how we use reason to navigate the dilemmas of our times. Being “Timeful”, “Factful” and aware of “Deep Time” as we build the stories that make sense of ourselves, means stepping outside of our immediate reality and looking to see where we fit in a much bigger scheme of things.  It means seeing ourselves as deeply embedded in myriad complex systems and working with humility and a little awe to understand and act. Below I’ve copied my thinking about each book or you can read the original reviews here on Goodreads . Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World by Marcia Bjornerud My rating: 5 of 5 stars Part geology lesson, part teleology and part plea to take seriously our responsibilities to our children and the planet. By taking the long view of history (that’s billions of years), Bjornerud reminds us that the human species is part of something very much bigger than ourselves. We are the product of evo...