Student Stickers: Reflecting upon Joyful Learning, Co-Creation, and the Politics of Playful Dissemination

‘Towards Joyful Learning’ is a participatory research project that has explored the role of joy and enjoyment in higher education. Our students co-produced stickers which acted as a visual and material artefact to showcase much of this work. Our six stickers (inclusive of our central project logo) offer playful visualisations of substantive contributions from the student co-production project on calls and recommendations to move us towards a joyful pedagogy. In presenting our stickers, we wish to illustrate three key points. First, we want to demonstrate how the process of collaboratively considering findings and the analytical metaphors and imagery facilitated a student-led analysis and dissemination: positioning students as active co-producers of knowledge and understanding. Second, and building upon scholarly work on stickers as symbols of protest and activism, we wish to showcase the playful, joyful but serious work of stickers in visual storytelling and political calls to action through their circulation. Third and finally, we centre the role of the sticker as both a participatory process and a form of dissemination that works with, for and by our audience of student communities in their interests, priorities and preferences for communication. This article offers both substantive and methodological contributions by (1) adding to the developing sociology of stickers and (2) examining stickers as an aid to the co-production and dissemination of knowledge with, by and for, students within higher education.