Mapping Joy: A Cross-Institutional Experiment in What Makes Learning Come Alive

There are moments in teaching when something shifts. A student who's been quiet all term suddenly has three questions at once. Someone leans forward. The energy in the room changes. Whatever you're doing—it's working. Not because it's entertaining or easy, but because something's clicked. They're curious. They want to know more.

That's intellectual joy. And we're being given six months to find out where it lives.

What We Get to Do

LJMU's Curriculum Enhancement Internships scheme is funding four student interns to spend six months studying what actually makes learning come alive. Not satisfaction scores. Not engagement metrics. Joy. The kind that makes you stay late in the library because you're genuinely interested. The kind that makes difficulty feel worthwhile.

This is cross-institutional work. I'll be working with colleagues and students from across the university to map where intellectual joy already exists and what conditions make it possible. The students aren't helping with the research; they're leading it. They'll interview peers, run focus groups, and collect stories about when learning genuinely sparked something. When did challenge feel exciting rather than exhausting? What made that seminar one you're still thinking about? Where does curiosity actually live in your degree?

Their lived experience is the expertise here. They know what joy feels like in learning, and they know what its absence feels like. We're just creating the space for them to name it, map it, and understand what enables it.

What Joy Actually Is

We're not talking about fun (although learning should be fun); joy happens when you're absorbed in ideas that matter, when difficulty feels generative rather than defeating, when you make connections that change how you see things. It's the intellectual energy that makes someone persist through a challenge because they're curious.

The i5 framework—Meaningful, Joyful, Social, Active, Iterative—developed by Harvard's Project Zero, the LEGO Foundation, and UN PRME, provides the theoretical grounding. Decades of research from neuroscience, psychology, and leadership studies show that joy isn't optional. It's a cognitive catalyst. Joy sharpens attention, deepens memory, supports creative problem-solving, and helps learners see challenges as invitations rather than threats.

But theory only gets you so far. What we're after is what students actually experience. Early thinking suggests six conditions worth exploring:

• Curiosity — teaching that opens questions rather than closing them
• Challenge — the good kind, where difficulty feels like an invitation
• Creativity — permission to try things that might not work
• Connection — learning linked to who you are and what you care about
• Autonomy — actual choice in how you learn and what you explore
• Accomplishment — building something that matters, knowing you can

These are what students consistently describe as energising, what makes learning feel worthwhile. What's different now is that we have time, funding, and institutional support to study them, to understand how they work together and to make them visible enough that we can design for them deliberately.

What We're Building Together

By July 2026, we'll have created three things:

The Joy Index Framework

A practical tool identifying the conditions that generate intellectual joy, with indicators colleagues can actually use to design and evaluate learning experiences—a lens for seeing what's already working and what might be possible.

An Atlas of Joyful Teaching

12-15 case studies co-written by staff and students, showcasing where intellectual joy already thrives across LJMU. Different disciplines, different approaches, but the same spark. This is about making visible what often goes unnoticed—the teaching that's already working because it creates the conditions for genuine curiosity, meaningful challenge, and real accomplishment.

Resources for Colleagues

Practical, accessible materials for integrating intellectual joy into module design and teaching practice. Hosted by the Teaching & Learning Academy, so they're there when colleagues need them.

But here's what matters most: the conversations. Students and staff talking openly about what makes learning come alive. Building a shared language for something we all recognise but rarely get to explore properly. Creating permission to prioritise what matters rather than what's easy to measure.

We get to do this work. Across faculties. With students as co-creators. With institutional support and dedicated time.

That's worth celebrating.

The Joy Index project runs from January to July 2026, supported by LJMU's Curriculum Enhancement Internships scheme. Follow along at Teaching Otherwise.