This is what one of my students, Camille, wrote as a conclusion of her essay on the Edularp Confinement (full text here):
"As always, it was really interesting and enriching to do role playing. Not only it makes us become more fluent in English, but it also helps to develop creativity and versatile skills. What is really great with role playing is that it allows us to get out of the “role” we play as pupils. We always use to act the same way in school, in a role that people are “expecting us to play” to a certain extent, and being another character makes us show other facets of our own personality. Also, it makes us understand what other people might think and why they act the way they do. (...)
Moreover, to role play is a very stimulating way of understanding History and to have an inside look of the society. Thanks to that, we appropriate History, it becomes more real to us. It is like being in a movie or in a book: we never know what can happen next and we have to face unusual situations.
In my opinion, role playing is extremely instructive for school but also for personal life and the understanding of people’s behavior. Playing an historical foreign role is twice more interesting because it is much more complex to figure out the epoch and the people. It was a nice experience!"
Camille's assesment is a perfect summary of the way roleplaying games have allowed me to work with a more engaging and active form of teaching which as been well-received by the students
The interest and advantages of using Larp are a teaching method are well explained in the following video
Many scholars have elaborated on the effectiveness of educational Larp to engage students in active, participatory learning all the while developing a variety of skills. Sarah Lynne Bowman, most notably, has tried to evaluate the success of educational Larp in Middle School. Among the interesting resources I would also quote Sanne Harder for her talk about role-playing as a teaching method at Nordic Larp Talks Copenhagen 2011, and Myriel Balzer and Julia Kurz article on "Learning by playing" which can be found on Nordiclarp.org.
The advantages which I find in Edularp are as follows:
- A participatory experience which engages all the students at the same time
- A practice which entices them to develop their learning for a concrete purpose (in that instance, developping their own character) and get a better understanding of the issues at hand
- An activity which bolsters their self-confidence and ability to take action
- An engagement in interaction which lets them explore more of their own personality and the others', as well as thinking about personal choices within a specific historical context
- An experience which tends to stick as it creates vivid memories, and situations which can be retained as true-to-life experience
These methods indeed can provide indeed a much more positive experience for both teachers and students.
