Mila Zhu – författare

This book empowers language and literacy teachers and researchers by framing teaching as the use of S.P.A.C.E. within constraints to create "playgrounds" where everyone can engage. It enhances readers’ ludic, language, and pedagogical literacies, encouraging them to play, learn, apply, and seek more. Drawing from decades of successful teaching and research, the book balances theory, research, and practice while critiquing gamification and game-based learning—advocating instead for genuine ludic approaches. It includes two rigorous courses to help readers design lesson plans and evaluate their teaching. Playful elements such as memes, jokes, anecdotes, and reflections on both successes and failures make the book engaging and relatable. With a humanistic approach that prioritizes teachers and students over technology, the book is also inclusive, offering ludic language pedagogy examples for diverse contexts. Additionally, it bridges the research-practice divide and integrates support from a dedicated community."From interactive strategies to playful techniques, this book is your passport to a rich adventure of literacy teaching. Whether you are a teacher or researcher, prepare to be inspired and entertained as you discover the intersection of play and games, literacy and language education. With tons of practical details, this is a perfect guide for teachers to find SPACE for their students to play!"—Matthew Farber, Associate Professor, University of Northern Colorado; author, Gaming SEL."Freedom to Play provides an engaging – and intrinsically playful – practical guide for language educators (and teachers more generally) looking to create more gratifying experiences in their classrooms. Underpinned by personal reflection and theory, this guide provides an accessible and convincing introduction to the value of playful learning."—Nicola Whitton, Professor of Digital Learning and Play, Northumbria University, UK

What if the syllabus were a menu? What if learning began with a bite? Edible Tales: Folklore, Myths, and Food Narratives in Higher Learning invites readers to the table, literally and intellectually, to explore how food stories shape knowledge, identity, ethics, and pedagogy. Structured as a twelve-course banquet, the book moves from forbidden fruits and mythic punishments to kitchen-table dialogues, classroom rituals, and contemporary visual art. Across chapters, contributors examine how food functions as law and transgression, nourishment and discipline, inheritance and invention. Eve's bite, Persephone's seeds, and Gretel's breadcrumbs are reread as moments where appetite becomes agency. Thanksgiving disasters become narrative laboratories. Off-calendar feasts and midnight breakfasts reveal how everyday rituals sustain resilience in academic and communal life. Olive oil tastings, medieval banquets, pupusa-making, and jollof debates demonstrate how foodways encode histories of gender, class, colonialism, migration, and belonging. Methodologically, Edible Tales blends scholarly analysis with creative forms: scripts, recipes, stage directions, audio guides, almanacs, and lesson "potions." The volume models how folklore and food narratives can be mobilized in higher education classrooms as rigorous, embodied ways of knowing. Contributors show how storytelling, shared snacks, sensory memory, and digital food archives can foster trust, critical reflection, and ethical engagement, particularly in interdisciplinary, humanities-based, and social justice-oriented pedagogy. Designed for scholars and educators in education, folklore, cultural studies, food studies, and the humanities, Edible Tales is also an invitation to instructors seeking innovative pedagogy, to students hungry for meaning, and to readers who believe that stories travel best when passed hand to hand. Come hungry. Leave with stories. Pack the leftovers as questions, and carry them into tomorrow. Perfect for courses such as: Food Studies; Folklore and Mythology; Cultural Studies; Narrative Inquiry / Qualitative Research Methods; Curriculum Studies; Interdisciplinary Humanities; Anthropology of Food; Education and Social Justice; Gender, Culture, and Society; Teaching and Learning in Higher Education