Learning Through Role-Play in Digital Teacher Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Designing Online Professional Development Toward Creative Production

Abstract

Though there has been great interest in educational gamification (Smiderle et al., 2020), there is a trend of focusing on points and incentives instead of the more difficult goal of disrupting traditional ways of teaching to center learning (Ito et al., 2012; Devers & Gurung, 2015). One way of using games to disrupt teacher-centric participation structures is through collective storytelling with TTRPGs (table top role-playing games). While there are clear artistic and social justice benefits to this kind of activity in English classrooms (Author, 2021), Cook and colleagues (2017) suggest the importance of teachers playing and watching games before implementing such activities in their own classrooms. In this study, we explore the engagement of emerging educators with TTRPGs in digital teacher education contexts.

We trace how emerging teacher (ETs) make mediational consequential learning transitions (Beach, 1999) between classroom roleplaying experiences, discussions about critical restorying in pedagogical contexts (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), and future imagined teaching contexts. As part of a three-year participatory design research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) involving an English education instructor and three cohorts of emerging educators, this project looks at the most recent iteration of the activity in virtual contexts (Spring 2021). ETs created characters to participate in a loose script of the poem “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, narrated by an ET “game master.” The research team--the instructor and two student participants--used grounded qualitative coding (Saldaña, 2015) on both asynchronous forum discussion posts relating to educator’s experiences with the game and their emerging thoughts on restorying and transcriptions of recordings of subsequent student reflections on the activity in class. Based on these emerging themes, we will trace the data for microanalytic form-function shifts (Saxe & Esmonde, 2005) pointing toward mediational transitions relating to teachers’ future imagined practices.

Preliminary findings show two emerging themes. First, ETs centered their own affective experiences to think about what kind of an experience they wanted to create for their future students. They also considered how their own experiences layering their own artistic creation with the canonical text acted as an interpretive scaffold for them and how such practice might be important for future students accessing the text. Second, teachers considered the affordance of digital vs. physical contexts for roleplaying and how that might impact their future classroom designs. They discussed their own affective experiences roleplaying in-person and online to consider issues like flow of the storytelling, engagement with characters, and immersion. Subsequent analysis will trace how ETs reconfigured participating in one context to designing for an experience in another, e.g. one ET’s project transforming Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” into a Buzzfeed quiz.

This research contributes to the nascent literature on the use of TTRPGs in teacher preparation and professional development contexts. Supporting ETs in making sense of their own experiences of artistic production in digital learning contexts makes room for alternative conceptions of design (i.e. considering affordances of learning contexts and emerging affective goals such as “students will feel…”).

Authors

• Karis Michelle Jones, Empire State College - SUNY

• Sasha Karbachinskiy, New York University

• Alexandra Salom, New York University