Play/Things
a Discovery Core Experience
This course may be taken as either a BCORE 107 (Social Sciences) or as a BCORE 104 (Arts & Humanities) course.
About This Course
You don’t have to be a scientist or explorer to discover the material world. In fact, you’ve been doing it since you were a baby. Play matters because it is a quintessentially human way of exploring materiality. Children know this, but our fast-paced, digitally-obsessed culture doesn’t often take the time to explore the profound social implications of everyday materiality. So, this class aims to discover the social life of everyday objects, especially the objects of material play: toys and board games. By inviting players to have intimate material encounters with socializing and symbolic things, these play-things exemplify the paradoxical ways the material becomes cultural and the cultural material.
Why Should I Take This Course?
To discover new insights within material experiences we’ve always had, we need to learn to become learners by practicing critical thinking, expanding our literacies, and tapping into library and other campus resources. The heartbeat of this class is a discovery portfolio, a collection of reflective creative nonfiction writings on people, places, and play/things throughout the quarter. In addition to collaborating on classroom activities, we will collectively workshop these portfolio entries to develop them into engaging, experiential writings that can contribute something unique to our larger communities. Finally, although our work is meant to engage a broader audience, we will also explore scholarship on material culture studies, toy studies, game studies, and related disciplines.
How Are We Assessed?
This course uses a labor-based grading system. This means grading focuses on the amount of work or effort you put into your assignments, rather than on scores based solely on perceived quality or correctness. The emphasis is placed on process over product, encouraging you to engage deeply with learning without the pressure of chasing perfect grades.
Dr. Jonathan Rey Lee (he/him/his)
School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences
Education
- B.S. Literature, Harvey Mudd College
- Ph.D. Comparative Literature, University of California, Riverside
Contact
Email: jreylee@uw.edu
Because play is an important part of being human, we’ll explore how play products weave significant cultural values in and around play.
Jonathan Rey Lee