– Hi, everyone. I’m Niya Bond, the faculty developer here at OneHE, and I am so excited to be here today with Eugene Korsunskiy, who’s gonna talk to us about something a little bit joyful. Specifically, we’re gonna be talking about joy cards. Welcome, Eugene. Thanks for being here with us.

– Thanks so much for having me.

– Could you tell the community just a little bit more about you, who you are, and how you got interested in this topic?

– Yeah, so you already introduced my name. Hi, everybody. I am a professor here at Dartmouth College, where I teach courses on design thinking, human-centered design. And something that I have believed for a very long time is that fun and joy are really important ingredients in creating the kind of learning environment in which students as well as teachers can thrive. And after lots of conversations with colleagues, I decided that it might be a delightful thing to do to put together some specific techniques, tools, tips, tricks that all of us use in our classrooms and beyond for how to create these kinds of joyful environments in which learners have a easier time with everything from focus to creativity, to problem solving, to collaboration. And so I put together this collection of joy cards, which are all activities crowdsourced from different kinds of educators that all of us can use in our classrooms and other teaching environments where we spend our time to make ourselves feel a little bit more joyful, make our students and collaborators feel a little bit more joyful as well.

– Wonderful. Now, before we get into talking specifically about what kinds of activities might be on the joy cards, can you tell us a little bit about the inspiration for this? Is joy and fun like a traditional part of design thinking, or is that just an extra element that you’re adding?

– I think design can’t help but incorporate joy and fun in it. But more broadly, I find myself in a higher education setting. And I’ve noticed, and I think many of my colleagues have noticed, that for whatever set of reasons, things like joy and fun tend not to be taken super seriously by academics who fancy themselves very serious, rigorous humans. And that seems like a shame. I think there’s been this false dichotomy set up between rigor on one side and joy and fun on the other. I think, and many of my colleagues believe deeply, that joy and fun are actually important contributors to rather than detractors from the serious work of teaching and learning.

I think when we have fun, when our students have fun, it’s easier to work hard. When you’re working hard, it’s easier to do your best work. And I think talking about things like delight or silliness in elite higher ed institutions is sometimes seen as somehow shirking the serious responsibility we have to be stewards of knowledge and creators of knowledge. And I think that maybe we shouldn’t be taking ourselves as seriously as we are. I think we should take our work seriously. I think we should have a serious, deep commitment to the craft of teaching, to the content that we teach, and certainly in design, we very much take the work of designing seriously. But I think the mindset that you bring to it, and many of my colleagues agree, if the mindset that you take is one of levity, of humor, then the work that you’re doing winds up being more effective, more powerful, more useful.

– I love that. And I think to your point, you know, in higher ed there’s kind of this binary around the word rigor. Like I myself have written about how maybe it’s not the right thing to focus on, and it sounds like you’re giving us an alternative perspective, like you said, to still take what we’re doing seriously and be intentional about it, but yeah, maybe it’s okay to to bring in other elements and to focus on other ways of interacting.

– Yeah. And there’s plenty of research that backs up the intuition that joy and fun actually contribute to students’ learning outcomes and other measures of success in academia, and beyond academia. There was a lovely book published recently by Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas Called “Humor, Seriously.” And in the book they go through lots of empirical data that suggests that organizations whose leadership intentionally infuses humor into everything from board meetings to daily operations of the organization perform measurably better by lots of different metrics than organizations whose leadership does not intentionally infuse humor into what they do. That’s just one collection of data points. And in that book they mostly talk about settings outside of academia, but settings within academia very, very much can be studied in same ways with same conclusions about the importance of things like humor to the serious mission of what we’re doing.

– Well now that we have a little bit of background, can you tell us about how things like joy and humor and silliness and fun manifest in a joy card? Like what is an example or a few examples of that?

– Sure. So I’ve got a copy here. I made these. I should say, these are crowdsourced. I was the editor of this volume, but I did not author every single one of these. They come from various educators, and the full set is available to anyone who would like to download them online for free. I made a few copies that are printed and bound. Once they’re bound, I call them “The Little Book of Joy,” ’cause once it’s bound and not loose, calling them cards seems not as technically appropriate. Anyway, it’s the same exact content. So, a couple of these that I can pick at random that I can suggest. So one that I love to do in my classrooms is called Creature Feature. And this one started when I overheard a few of my students talking in the classroom about how they miss their pets. Often students in residential colleges have pets, dogs, cats, salamanders, back at home whom they miss. And so I’ve said, “Well, why don’t you send me a picture of one of your pets and I’ll put it up in the PowerPoint in the beginning of class for everyone to just look at and admire a moment of cuteness and have warm and fuzzy feelings at the beginning of class.” And one student did that and everybody really appreciated it, and so I got into a tradition of now having a standing invitation to all of my students to email me pictures of their pets.

And every day I start class by the very first slide on the projector is a picture of someone’s pet, so that when people walk in and take their seats, the very first thing they see is something cute and silly, and we call it the Creature Feature. And the person who sent it in gets to start class by telling us about this creature that we are featuring and what is the creature’s name and tell us about its delightful, cute attributes. And it’s a really easy, short, simple way to bring some delight, bring some warmth into a classroom. So that’s a quick and easy one that anyone could do. Another one of these activities, this one comes from Kim Hoffmann at Northwestern University. She calls it In Support of Doodling. And the premise is just take large butcher paper or other large rolls of paper and cover the tables in your classroom, assuming you have large flat tables. Just cover the tables in the classroom with the paper and encourage students to draw, write, doodle whatever they want on it and leave that paper there for the duration of the semester. And it becomes this amazing canvas on which students express their creativity in the middle of class, between class, by doodling, by playing tic-tac-toe with each other, by leaving little traces of their creativity and turning the classroom into a more vibrant, delightful, environment.

And then at the end of the semester, you can take the sheet of paper off and you have this beautiful doodled mural that represents the creativity of everyone who’s been in that classroom over the past semester. So, there’s a real range, excuse me, there’s a real range to the kinds of activities that we’ve got depicted here in the collection of joy cards. Some of these take five minutes. Some of these can take a whole semester. And the hope is that educators using these cards can find something that fits the setting that they want to use one of these activities in. Whether it’s something that requires some props or doesn’t require props, whether it’s something that’s quick and easy and takes only a minute or maybe is a little more involved and takes 20 or 30 minutes. So the hope is that there’s a little bit of something for everyone in here, and hopefully is useful.

– That’s wonderful. I was gonna say, it sounds very cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary in that, like, and, you know, any educator could kind of implement it even if they need to tweak it a tiny bit in whatever environment they’re in. I also love that you’re focusing on warmth, you’re focusing on fun, but that’s gonna have such ripple effects for students or learners to feel a real sense of belonging and like they belong in that space, they are part of it. You know, they’re not just absorbing it, but they’re contributing to it, which I think is so, especially in higher ed, important these days. And there’s just so much potential for, as you said, community building. Even like pedagogical partnerships with learners, you know, like a creative art piece. That’s just such a wonderful way to welcome and encourage someone to be a part of an environment.

– Absolutely. And the neuroscience is very much on our side with conclusions like these. In fact, there are specific, from a biochemistry standpoint, there are specific hormones that are associated with the kinds of mindsets that are thought of as joyful or fun. There are specific ways we can elicit these hormones. There are specific functions that these hormones play, and these are not limited to but include dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin. Each of these, there are specific ways to elicit them. For example, for endorphins, doing things like exercising or even having a two-minute stretch session in the beginning of class is a great way to stimulate an endorphin release. And we know that an increased level in endorphins is associated with lower stress, boosted focus, boosted creativity. So there’s real science behind the cognitive benefits that some of these joyful activities allow our learners to achieve, and a lot of those are related to the stimulation and the release of these what we call happy hormones.

– Wonderful. Well, we’ll be sharing a link to the joy cards so that anyone in the community and beyond can go check them out. We always like to leave the last word to our expert. It can be something on the topic we’re talking about today, a book you wanna recommend, a TV show you’re watching. Whatever you want the final word to be, it’s all yours.

– Thanks. I would love to end on an invitation. The first collection of joy cards that’s out now, I very much want it to be just the first of many editions. So anyone in our community and beyond, I would love to ask you to send to me your suggestions for activities that you do in your classroom and beyond to bring joy to yourself, to bring joy to your students. There’s a link I set up on the website that will be linked to here where you can submit your own idea for a joyful activity or exercise. And as soon as I have a critical mass of submissions, my intention is to make the next version or the next edition or volume of these. And the hope is to continuously curate and put out this wonderful crowdsourced reference for all of us to freely use. So thank you in advance for that.

– Well, wonderful. I hope everyone gets to contribute and collaborate and this just keeps going.

– Thanks.