“Learning and Transfer through Role-playing and Edu-larp: A Cognitive Perspective”
Josefin Westborg
Originally presented at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference, April 13, 2022.
Role-playing games and edu-larps are used in education to facilitate learning. But how does it work? And for what? In this talk I will show how cognitive research seems to give a foundation for that role-playing games could be a good tool for transfer of knowledge.
One of the most classic problems in educational psychology is the transfer problem (Illeris, 2015). Transfer is when you apply what you’ve learned in one context in another context. This is something we humans are pretty bad at. To be able to transfer knowledge you need to have encoded the information, be able to access it, and then manage to apply it. To get better at encoding, regular exposure at the time when you are about to forget the information helps with building a stronger memory. We also seem to be better at remembering stories (Gärdenfors, 2006) and stories help us see causation between information and context (Didau & Rose, 2018). Role-playing games are about creating stories. But it doesn’t matter how well we know something if we can’t access it. If there are no clues that help us retrieve the memory we won’t be able to use it. (Didau & Rose, 2018) All learning is made in a context. When trying to retrieve something we learned it is easier if the situation we are in reminds us of the situation we learned the information in (Eich, 1980). The more different situations we learn something in the more hooks we have to be able to recall it. Role-playing is about stepping into another world, another context. This gives us many more potential hooks and reference points than only working with ordinary teaching. I argue that this might be one of the strengths of working with role-playing in education even though more research is needed.
Bio: Josefin Westborg is one of the world’s leading designers in edularps. She has a background in game design and pedagogy and is one of the founders of Lajvbyrån (previously LajvVerkstaden Väst). She now works as a teacher as part of the Transformative Play Initiative with focus on analogue games at Uppsala University at the Department of Game Design. Throughout her career she has met thousands of students of all ages, and run and designed larps for them. She has also been a teacher in game design at both Chalmers University of technology and the University of Gothenburg. She is passionate about designing for interaction, storytelling and learning. When she is not involved with games you will probably find her at the dance studio doing ballroom dancing.
”Though she be but little, she is fierce.”