Adult Playfulness: Finnish Teachers Evaluating Their Own Playfulness

Teachers need playfulness when designing teaching and learning. Acknowledging their playfulness as a pedagogical competence is important. Playfulness as a personality trait and as a quality of activities is studied in children but less often teachers. To explore teachers’ playfulness, we used a Finnish language version of Staempfi’s (2005) Adolescent Playfulness Scale (APF20). In Staempfli’s instrument, the constructs measured are Physical Animation, Social Engagement, Mental Spontaneity, Emotional Fluidity and Humorous Perspective. The participants (N = 123) were pre-service and in-service teachers as well as teachers who were retired or temporarily out of work in different educational fields. A multivariate analysis was conducted on the APF20 subscales examining the influence of gender and age. The results reveal that educators evaluate themselves as being high in playfulness, particularly their social and interactional dimension of playfulness is strong. Playfulness is mainly consistent between different age groups and females’ emotional fluidity is higher than males. The study adds to the knowledge on teachers‘ playfulness and the results are useful in teacher education and teacher work.