by Beckie Supiano
Chronicle of Higher Education Teaching Newsletter
Infusing delight
Sometimes, professors operate as if having fun and feeling joy are at odds with doing serious, rigorous work. But that’s a false dichotomy, says Eugene Korsunskiy, an associate professor who teaches human-centered design courses in the engineering school at Dartmouth College. A sense of joy actually has cognitive benefits that support creativity, problem-solving, and teamwork.
“Joyful learning environments,” Korsunskiy says, “help students thrive.”
Students who are having the most fun, he says, tend to do the best work. Teams that work well together produce the best work. And that goes for instructors, too, Korsunskiy added — his best lesson plans and workshops are the ones he enjoys making.
To help instructors spark that sense of joy in the classroom — or in any learning environment — Korsunskiy has curated a set of “Joy Cards,” which anyone can download here. Each card contains an activity, some of which might take half an hour and others just a minute or two, that Korsunskiy gathered from attendees at a workshop where he gave a keynote on joy last year.
After posting about the cards on LinkedIn, Korsunskiy received positive feedback from readers, some of whom observed that many of the ideas work in a variety of settings, including online courses.
At least one faculty developer suggested the cards might be appealing during a stressful time for higher ed. “Without ignoring the harsh and frightening realities of, well, reality, we can still make some space for joy” in teaching, posted Jessamyn Newhaus, who directs the teaching center at Syracuse University.
Activities in the card deck include having students contribute course-related songs to a playlist, which professors can play during breaks; covering classroom tables with brown paper to encourage students to doodle; and starting off each class period’s slides with a student-submitted pet picture that the student can briefly introduce.
Korsunskiy, who also co-directs the Design Initiative at Dartmouth, has printed and spiral-bound a small number of card decks (as “The Little Book of Joy: Tiny Ways to Infuse Delight Into Teaching and Learning”); he said he’s open to finding a way to sell them if there’s sufficient interest. And he’s collecting more examples with an eye to making additional decks.