Creative and Playful Pedagogy: 2026 AAPT-APA Teaching Hub

This session is an experimental space for bringing creativity and playfulness into the philosophy classroom. Often, as educators, it can be easy for us to find ourselves in the same traditional classroom routines: delivering lectures, assigning papers, and perhaps—on our very best days!—facilitating discussion. These rote mechanisms and practices, while useful to a certain extent, can sometimes obscure the fact that philosophy is fun; and that practicing philosophy, that odd activity to which we try to introduce our students, both requires and deserves our whole, creative, and playful selves.

In an era increasingly characterized by a view of higher education that seems ‘transactional’—students see themselves as bound to show up in the classroom / submit the deliverables required to receive their credentials—we are curious about methods, practices, and orientations that have the potential to transform the philosophy classroom into a space of joyful curiosity.