Cambridge Uni Wants a ‘Professor of Play’

Fancy a salary of around £80,000 and the chance to study how play affects our development and learning? Well then Cambridge University has the perfect opportunity for you! If you get your application in by Friday 20^th you could be heading up the brand new Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning (Pedal).

“The value of play is relatively under-researched,” says Prof Anna Vignoles, interim director of Pedal and a member of Cambridge University’s faculty of education. “You have people who are claiming that it enhances learning, that it’s important, that it’s good for children’s wellbeing. All of that might be true, but actually there’s remarkably little evidence for that. The aim of the Pedal centre is to conduct rigorous research into the importance of play and how playful learning can be used to improve students’ outcomes.”

And you know that the future of this new research centre is in the right hands, as a large amount of funding has been offered by none other than the Danish masters of playtime, Lego.

The Lego Foundation is hoping for a candidate with a “childlike mindset”: “an academic who is playful, extremely curious, open-minded, imaginative and creative – someone who can think of new ways of doing research and work across different disciplines,” says Bo Stjerne Thomsen, global head of research for the Lego Foundation.

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Instagram image from @lego