I am currently a PhD Candidate in the Learning Sciences program in Indiana University's School of Education. My work in the learning sciences aims at advancing sociocultural theories of learning and developing playful frameworks of research with goals of developing innovative science learning curriculum, technology, and environments through co-design alongside youth (Ryan, 2024).

 

Across my work, I primarily focus on the cultural practice of play and its deep connections to the learning process, not just in young children, but across the lifespan. Play as an everyday practice offers a cultural window into the lived experiences of children, and naturally fosters critical processes of learning such as negotiation, inquiry, and curiosity. In my current work, I seek to better understand how young students’ epistemic and axiological orientations of complex phenomena emerge through playful learning experiences situated in the natural world. 

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For example, my dissertation project, entitled “Playful participatory design: Centering youths’ heterogeneity in the co-design of playful learning experiences” aimed to look at how play be used in efforts of co-design in informal place-based learning environments aimed at exploring local ecologies. In the summer of 2024, I carried out participatory design research (PDR) that involved youth and workers at a local community center participating as co-designers and co-researchers in developing a playful, outdoor, place-based curriculum for future naturalists to use in their educational programming. I found that centering play as a joint activity between researchers and youth supported youth in developing their epistemic and axiological perspectives regarding organisms and elements of our local ecologies such as wetlands, creeks, and local parks.

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Play is at the heart of all of my work, and emerges in different ways across my theories of learning, designs for learning, and methodology for studying learning. I am theoretically informed through viewing both play and learning as a fundamental sociocultural process entangled in one's own funds of knowledge and identity. Designing for and through play is a central element in how I forge research-practice partnerships, and carry out participatory design research alongside various community stakeholders. In order to study the intersections of play and learning through a sociocultural lens, I focus on the microgenetic level of interaction through qualitative methods of video analysis to better understand how learning emerges through play across moment-to-moment interaction. To learn more about my work, see some of my recent publications below, or you can check out my curriculum vitae or other research projects I have worked on while in my PhD program.