Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE

Using Role Play as a Way in to the History of Science

Author: Charlotte Sleigh

Journal Title: Discourse

ISSN:

ISSN-L: 1741-4164

Volume: 3

Number: 2

Start page: 131

End page: 141

Return to vol. 3 no. 2 index page

Introduction

In 2001 I started using role play as an introduction to the history of science (Sleigh, 2003). I wrote a role play which formed the first seminar in the history module ‘Introduction to Literature and Science’, whose participants were first year undergraduates, mostly taking literature degrees. Drawing on role play literature, this paper discusses the aims and potential benefits of using role play as a way in to the history of science. Practical aspects of role play planning are described, and the actual outcomes in my own experience are evaluated.

Before this, it will be helpful to define precisely what is here meant by role play. A great deal of role play literature discusses it in the context of psychology (Yardley-Matwiejczuk, 1997), whether organisational (workplace training etc.), clinical (therapeutic) or research-orientated (finding out how people behave in certain conditions). Of these, the first two types are about changing participants’ everyday attitudes or behaviours through empathetic play or play in which participants act as themselves (van Ments, 1983: 51). The idea is that through debriefing and repetition the behaviours engendered by the play become ever more ‘natural’ until they are expressed in real life. Role play in the teaching of history has no such aim; although it aims to change attitudes it is not in the directly transferable sense of learning to be more assertive, less racist or whatever. It is about gaining insight into a process, rather than improving one’s performance within that process. In this sense it begins to approach the psychologist’s third use for role play—research—with the difference that through reflection and discussion, the ‘experimental subjects’ are also the researchers. As such it is close to the definition of ‘sociodrama’ offered by van Ments, where ‘the emphasis … is on the problems associated with the social role which an actor is playing rather than the individual’s problems’ (van Ments, 1983: 156). Yardley-Matwiejczuk (1997: 65) draws on an earlier distinction between ‘role taking’ and ‘role playing’ to make a similar point; the emphasis of the former is merely on inference and understanding of the other participant(s). (A third option, ‘playing at a role’, introduces the possibility of including an element of deceit in the play. If role play were developed as a part of a historiographically orientated course, this might be an interesting avenue to explore.) ‘Role taking’ is much closer to what is described here.

Another commonly used term is ‘simulation’. The implication here is that there is a normative pattern of interaction towards which the role players should tend. As such, it is more appropriate to language teaching or psychological training than history teaching. Nevertheless, the defining qualities of simulation offered by Jones, 1982, are useful for the purposes of teaching history:

  1. It must have ‘reality of function’, in other words, the participants must step inside the role they have accepted and act accordingly...
  2. The environment is simulated. There is no contact with the real world.
  3. A simulation must have a structure. The participants must not pretend or invent. They must have all the facts and information provided for them.

Jones’ fairly rigid conditions (he adds to point 1 ‘there must be no fooling around’—an unnecessarily killjoy approach in my opinion) certainly work well as a starting point, though one could imagine more sophisticated role play where they was scope for pretence and invention on the part of players.

The remainder of the paper will continue to refer to ‘role play’ for the sake of simplicity, within the definitions and restrictions described above.

Aims of role play

1) Skills-based:

a) To accustom students to participating in seminars—There has been a great deal of work on the frustrating dynamics that can all too easily develop in the group context (see Beckham, 2003: 76-7); it would be a most unusual tutor who did not recognise the common difficulties of silence and resistance in the seminar room. Addressing the aim of student participation is particularly important in the first seminar of a series, since behaviour in this seminar sets the pattern for the remainder of the course (Entwhistle et al., 1992, pp. 41-50; Davis et al., n.d., section 10.2). Role play, because of its unexpected and compulsorily participatory nature, has the potential to start things positively and to prevent undesirable group dynamics from crystallising.

b) To establish the pattern that all seminars are, to a certain extent, an intellectual ‘game’—It can take a while to become assured that the tutor will regard a student at least as highly for refining an initial opinion in the course of discussion as for saying something ‘clever’ at the outset. Students often fail to appreciate the provisional nature of seminar discussion, and hence remain too shy to speak. Such students do not understand that ideas can be exchanged and critiqued without their approbation or disapprobation being taken personally. Some even find it hard to understand or accept the non-personal engagement of the role play set-up (van Ments, 1983: 122-4 and personal observation). Nevertheless, role play offers a more obvious possibility for students literally to play a part in a seminar if that part takes the form of an adopted persona. Role play provides the safety of a mask, sheltering behind which the student can try out ideas and arguments (Porter Ladousse, 1987: 7; van Ments, 1983: 24-5).

Porter Ladousse (1987: 11) suggests a debriefing discussion of the feelings engendered by participation in role play, asking students to evaluate their position on a spectrum of ‘natural’ to ‘embarrassed’. She reports that the variety of responses to this question always astonishes class members, who tend to expect everyone to feel the same as them. This exercise could provide a good link into talking about seminar participation in general and how it functions.

2) Understanding-based:

a) To develop generic historical understanding—Defining role play carefully allows one to think through fairly precisely what generic skills it exercises. Elements of generic understanding mentioned by the QAA History Benchmark statement that might be fostered in part through role play include (iii) Independence of mind, and initiative; (iv) Ability to work with others, and have respect for others’ reasoned views; (v) Ability to gather, organise and deploy evidence … ; (vi) Analytical ability, and the capacity to consider and solve problems … ; (x) Empathy and imaginative insight (Fletcher et al, 2000).

Of these, (iii), (iv) and (x) are the skills most obviously involved in role play. Experiencing historical processes through role play challenges both analytical and imaginative attitudes more effectively than reading or listening to lectures (van Ments, 1983: 23). The process also enables the student ‘to cope with the idea of uncertainty’ (ibid.), a vital step in weaning students from the idea that the answers are at the back of the book.

Role play is an interesting technique in that it offers the possibility to go beyond trivial empathy involving personal experience as it is often interpreted in schools (for example, ‘what it felt like to be in the Blitz’), and instead employs empathy as a route into thinking about historical processes.

b) To develop specific HTSM understanding—Role play might help with the very specific ‘corrective’ aspect of the HTSM Benchmark Supplement to the History Benchmark Statement (Gooday et al, 2002). This emphasises the need to challenge students’ assumptions about science, such as those of the internality of scientific ‘progress’, the epistemologically self-evident existence of ‘fact’ and the ‘purity’ of the ‘scientific method’ (for a recent survey of contemporary historiography in HSTM see Golinski, 1998). Graeme Gooday has outlined in his paper (Gooday, 2003) a list of ways in which students of HTSM should ‘develop an understanding of HSTM as consisting of multifaceted processes’, and all of these are consonant with the aim of role play within HTSM.

My own use of role play took place within the context of a course on literature and science, delivered to groups mostly consisting of English Literature undergraduates. Humanities students often suffer from science-phobia, feeling that science is something too ‘clever’ for them, a closed book upon which they could never knowledgeably comment. This role play was specifically designed to show that a minimal grasp of technicalities is easy, and most importantly that the social dimensions of science, upon which they can easily comment, are in fact a central part of the scientific process. I deliberately picked a debate (global warming) with which students were vaguely familiar but whose outcome is not yet certain, so that students were not tempted to retreat to ‘fact’ as an explanans for events.

The unpredictable linguistic features of role play (Porter Ladousse, 1987: 6) were also useful in the context of a course on science and literature. In character, students naturally used different language to describe the same phenomena. Derogatory or technical terms could be applied, depending on their perspective. This feature also proved a useful starting point for discussion, bearing in mind recent work on the power of language and metaphor not only to reflect but also to shape science (Beer, 2000).

 

Setting it up

Van Ments (1983), Porter Ladousse (1987) and Yardley-Matwiejczuk (1997) all give useful general advice about the set-up, running and debriefing of role play. All sources are agreed upon the importance of three stages in the process: preparation, running and debriefing.

In the context of preparation, van Ments (1983: 82-3) stresses the importance of not giving emotionally-loaded descriptions to the characters, but rather allowing the students to develop this aspect of their role from factual details. This may be more important if the aim of the role play is particularised empathy, which is not the case in a history class. He also suggests some possible ways around the inevitable problem that the number in the class does not match the number of characters in the role play. These include ‘doubling’ characters (two students per role—the strategy I have used thus far) or writing a committee into the scenario, whose numbers can be flexible (which I plan to try next time). There are also issues to consider regarding role assignment—whether or not genders of roles and players should be matched, or natural temperaments to fictional characters. My own strategy, given the first, participatory, aim of the exercise, has been to assign roles completely at random, allowing students to swap if they feel extremely uncomfortable with their lot.

Another key element of writing the scenario, according to at least one commentator, is the importance of allowing players to affect the outcome of the role play (van Ments, 1983: 110). There is room for debate here. Yardley-Matwiejczuk states that ‘if you have a highly circumspect goal … a role play that has already been predetermined or highly scripted (a closed role play) is likely to be useful, certainly as a starting point’ (Yardley-Matwiejczuk , 1997: 107; see also p. 140, points 4-6). Although Yardley-Matwiejczuk is discussing role play in relation to interventionist psychological goals, her point may also stand with regard to the HTSM historiographical goals of this exercise; role play in this particular instance was intended to make a circumspect point about the social contingency of scientific development. Again, this highlights how the exercise was closer to a simulation or sociodrama than role play as commonly understood. Nevertheless, it struck me that allowing students to alter the outcome of the scenario would make this point even more clearly, and so I have written this possibility into the latest draft.

Debriefing is just as important as the role play itself. Most authors agree that the period allowed for this should be at least as long as the scenario (van Ments, 1983: 131). The questions must be pitched carefully to bridge between what the participants experienced and the point(s) that the tutor wishes to make. The first time I did this, I pitched the questions at much too high a level. Besides addressing the HTSM aims of the exercise, a discussion of the exercise itself might also be used to help students reflect upon its two skills-based aims.

Does it work?

1) Skills-based:

a) To accustom students to participating in seminars—Here, I felt that the exercise was helpful. Some students found themselves speaking before they realised it, and the pattern stuck for the year. In their module evaluation forms, students have consistently highlighted a dramatic improvement in their speaking skills, and informal verbal feedback has described the groups as having livelier than average discussion. I think the role play was an important starting point for this. How would one prove that this exercise encourages a predisposition to speak up in seminars generally? Each group is so different it is virtually impossible to imagine an empirically valid answer to this question. (It is also ironic that this is the answer one instinctively wants when the exercise was designed to highlight the socially contingent nature of scientific experiment.).

The set-up, running and debriefing of a role play all contribute to the sense of productive involvement on the part of students, and hence to their participation in future seminars. The next evolutionary stage in the global warming role play will be to add one or two points at which the story bifurcates, so that the class actually decides which path things take. This additional sense of empowerment, besides making even more strongly the point about historical contingency, should create additional motivation for participation if van Ments is correct.

b) To establish the pattern that all seminars are, to a certain extent, an intellectual ‘game’—A small minority of students found it very hard to play along with the global warming role play, and to dissociate their characters’ opinions from their own. These same students found it difficult to take an objective stance on books throughout the year. For instance, when Emily was asked “Do you think Jack London intended his readers to think of the dogs in The Call of the Wild as immoral or amoral?” (having first explored the meaning of those terms) she replied, “No, I don’t think you should fight or steal—that is wrong”. This highly subjective response was, I suggest, related to her failure to realise that she was not being called upon to form personal judgements for which she was morally responsible. (I am assuming here that all academics would agree that seminars are intellectual games: that although all academics would desire their students to exercise personal or moral responsibility on some level it can be displaced to outside of the content of seminar discussion. This assumption might, however be open to a rather interesting debate.). Yet my hunch was that the exercise was helpful: that it loosened up the groups for the remainder of the year. Again, it is difficult to see how one would prove this, in other words that the role play enabled at least some students to make the leap into non-personal criticism. And, of course, it would take more than a single role play to allay students’ fear of being personally on the line in seminars; a consistently supportive atmosphere must be developed.

2) Understanding-based

a) Generic historical understanding—There was no doubt in my mind that the role play exercised the generic skills outlined above and did so, moreover, in an enjoyable manner. During the role play itself students exercised initiative in developing their characters, often in a very entertaining way; in character, they were required to respond to others’ views and to act empathetically and imaginatively. During the debriefing, students gathered, organised and deployed evidence from the play in order to answer questions, exercising analytical ability in order to consider and solve the questions posed.

The success of role play in this respect might lead one to wonder how much of a history course (including HTSM courses) might be based upon role play. A fictional role play such as this is clearly of limited use for any substantive knowledge-based learning. An exception to this might be a course significantly devoted to historiography, where more reflexive questions might be raised concerning what kind of things can be learned about history from role play, and to what extent the role play was a good model for actual historical processes. In the context of psychology, Yardley-Matwiejczuk claims that role play lays bare tacit epistemological assumptions in psychological research and hence ‘offer(s) tools with which to facilitate … reflexive scrutiny’ (Yardley-Matwiejczuk 1997: 5; for different epistemological interpretations of role play see pp. 9-14). Can the same thing be said for history? The global warming role play implicitly proceeds along the lines of interest theory; students might discuss to what extent its emphasis on agency and intentionality is valid, and explore other ways of writing historical role play. It strikes me that a total rejection of role play’s epistemological validity is a very interesting (and somewhat defeatist) claim, echoing Feyerabend’s statement that history is too complex for the best methodologist to imagine.

b) Specific HTSM understanding—Debriefing my students yielded some encouraging remarks, such as “I never realised that so many people can influence the direction science takes”; “I hadn’t really thought before about the human aspect of science” and “I guess I thought facts were somehow more obvious”. By the time of their first essays, some seven weeks later, however, they were making all the usual assumptions: that ‘literature’ (or in some cases, ‘the author’) is parasitic upon ‘science’, and that the most interesting or useful critique of the literature of science is whether or not the writer got the science ‘right’.

I am sure that this disappointing long-term result was not inevitable. Largely, I suspect, it stemmed from a failure to continue building on the insights students derived from the initial session. An ongoing role play, such as that used by Fincher and Utting (n.d.) might be one way to sustain the HSTM perspective. The nature of the syllabus also made it difficult for students in this instance, who for their first set text were implicitly required to take the insights from a contemporary perspective back to the early days of the Royal Society and Gulliver’s Travels. I suspect that the historical context was too alien to allow a translation of their previous perceptions.

This raises a question about the possibility of using ‘non-fictional’ role plays to delve into non-contemporary STM. There are few such role plays in existence, notably some inspired by Brecht’s treatment of Galileo (Allchin, 2000). What are the differences between fictional and ‘real’ (or reality-based) role plays such as the Galileo examples? The latter group forecloses the historiographical questions outlined in the previous section, arguably giving a misleading impression that it accurately captures the mechanics of historical contingency. Its chief value, therefore, lies perhaps in knowledge-based rather than understanding-based outcomes. Students are familiarised with historical material and (with careful tutor critique) modes of argument—both of which, of course, are very valuable outcomes.

Conclusion

Role play is definitely one useful way to work on important skills-based desiderata in both history and HSTM. Its value as an understanding-based historical and historiographical exercise is subject to some caveats, both theoretical and practical. Nevertheless, it has value in making a lively point about the social embeddedness of science. One might ask whether these outcomes should be assessed. On one hand, assessment should be consonant with the desired learning outcomes (Ramsden, 1992: 123-4); if role play is a good way to develop these, it would appear also to be a sensible assessment method. On the other hand, the entertainment value of the exercise would certainly be diminished were students anxious about their marks. Students’ behaviour, both in acting and analysis, would almost certainly become more conservative and constrained. The possibility of assessing role play is discussed by Jarvis and Cain (2003).

One might also ask to what extent the specific understanding aims of role play in HTSM might apply to other students, such as STM undergraduates and even school children, whether in the context of a science or humanities-based curriculum. STM undergraduates are less likely to need affirmation that they can follow scientific details, but are just as likely to need encouragement to think of science as a social process. Role play might also perform both these functions in the proposed AS Level ‘Perspectives in Science’. A common use of role play in non-HSTM academia is to encourage students to think about the ethical or social significance of their subjects (AAS, n.d.; Alden, 2000; Epstein, 1997; Sutcliffe, 2000). Thus role play can be seen as a way for scientists and non-scientists alike to see the social dimensions of science. For scientists this might be a prompt to consider applied questions of ethics and generally to motivate study through an appreciation of the discipline’s social impact; this also holds for HSTM students with the additional function of offering a route into historical—and perhaps historiographical—understanding of science. It suggests a natural connection between the teaching of science and HSTM, a welcome possibility in the context of curriculum development and the Science Wars.

Bibliography

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This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.

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The British Association for the Study of Religions
The Religious Studies Project