To Play or Not to Play: Edu-Larp in Curricular Settings – Katrin Geneuss

[Music] welcome today from the transformative play initiative at uppsala university we are so excited today to have katrine genoise here with us um who is going to be speaking about educational role-playing which i know a lot of you are really excited to hear about as well um my name is sarah lynn bowman and i work at uppsala university's campus Scotland in the department of game design where the transformative plate initiative is housed although really the way that we see this is more of a movement kind of bringing together people who are all doing like-minded sort

of work uh using role-playing as a vehicle for change all right um wow i had the pleasure of uh not only Co-hosting a small workshop with katrine where we talked about edgy larp but also being able to interview her for a project that i'm doing and i just was so inspired learning about all the different types of games that she's run over the years in her work and i really am very happy to that she'll be able to share that with you as well today so here's the official bio Katrine ginoise is a professor at

interim in the faculty of teacher education at the department for german language and literature at segan university in germany moreover she is a guest researcher at ludwig maximilian's universitat munich at the research center for values education she holds a phd with an empirical study of modeling edu larp as a drama tool in German lessons her her main focus in research and teaching are hybrid learning arrangements applied in language teaching prior to working at segan university katrine worked as a teacher and lecturer in uppsala sweden at maximilian's university and at orsberg university and so with that

i will hand it over to you katrin Thank you so very much sarah for this introduction and thank you for having me for hosting me and my team's work so um i i really would uh invite you to join me here when i share my slides and take you to the lecture to play or Not to play for the next 60 minutes i'm gonna take you to the classrooms that we've been uh working in with the students with their teachers uh it was lots of experimental work but also like a long and slow process of

research behind the scenes um to make a long story short these are the questions uh that we've been trying to answer throughout the past Five six years can i do larp be applied in schools what are the effects on students and what are the challenges and just in case you don't have 90 minutes tonight let me give you the quick answers yes edular can be applied in schools at least in german schools uh i have to add that because we have only been doing our research in southern germany i would say from my Experience that

it could be applicable to other schools in other countries but uh well that would be due um to test the further testing of course what are the effects on students here the short answer is we don't really know um and why that is i will tell you in the lecture and what are the challenges well in schools There are restrictions to of place and time um and since we can't really tell what skills are being improved like we don't really know how to verify these effects that is something that clashes a little bit with rules

but there are solutions so um i'll be happy to uh to take you with me uh on on that journey that we embarked six years ago Um and to tell you more about the answers to those questions and i mean you might be wondering that is a long time for very little answers uh yeah and and that's research and yet we had a lot of fun and we had a lot of in-between results and in today's lecture i'm not only going to talk about that research i'm also going to show you some examples of edu

larps of live role playing games That we have designed and conducted in the classrooms um i'm going to show you the design and facilitation principles that we have deducted from our results then there will be a yet another example of a nettler called accused um and if time after showing you where you could read more about our research i Would take you to the party one of our most recent hybrid eclipse all right so um as sarah just said um my my academic journey has taken me to different universities but also to several countries and

uh i actually uh my my whole edu larp journey started off in sweden when i got in touch with live verizon Uh a company designing and facilitating at your larps in schools and for other schools activities as well and they have uh dozens of years of experience and just seeing what they were doing in swedish classrooms since i was working as a Teacher there i got so inspired and curious like what is that thing they call edular like i had never heard of it i'm not a larper myself but i'm a passionate drama teacher so

i was very curious started investigating embarked on a phd and then um i built it's not a company but it's a group of people Just as like works done we go out to the classrooms design larps and conduct them in the classrooms with the teachers and this is called star manufacture and you'll be seeing many members of my wonderful team tonight on the photographs and what we are doing since that term edu larp is so difficult and to german ears they can really get sweaty just because It's so alien um i decided and i will

be talking more about that i decided to call it stars student activating role-playing games just because role-playing games is something that teachers can relate to that's something they're doing and then stars uh like being a star you know everybody's active Everybody's in the limelight so that should be the connotation of it and then at sleeping university and alamo i had my my research being implemented in both my teaching and my development activities okay so to start off with the terminology and similar techniques um there are many similar techniques and I um sometimes you would hear

that edular is an innovative technique well it is as much as process drama stimulation global planche feel like strategic simulation games or theatrically pressed i mean those have been there for decades but not forever and especially not forever in classrooms i think what makes uh edular a bit special Compared to to these four that i just mentioned is that edular has its origin in tabletop role-playing games and is therefore connected to a different community than august de boas theatre of the oppressed heath code and gavin's process drama or other strategic simulation games However edularp is

a very open concept and if you saw one of the uh four um one one of those aforementioned um games in the classroom you would not be able to tell like is that an edu larp is that something else you know because edges are not really very cut and clear Um yet there are some distinctive features to edular and there is the so-called unique setting point and it's not just one feature that is that unique setting point but it's where all of these get together um we have quite a lot long quite a long Role-playing

phase which is most of the times uninterrupted everybody present is in character usually we have setting characters and the plot and in an edular we meet physically we do not just sit at a table usually but we stand up interact and act as these characters there then Uh quite importantly in an angular there are preset learning goals um because in some of these other the previously mentioned techniques the process might be the learning goal itself but in an edular uh that usually you set the learning goals in the very beginning then you design your larp

cross check all the time What do these scenes really add to the learning objectives and then in the reflection you tie to those learning objectives again there is a preparation and reflection so it's like a three step uh technique and of course there are certain rules and most importantly respect uh and on par interaction And this might all of this might apply to other techniques as well but um from what i learned in my research talking to experts who have been dealing with edular for a long time this is what makes it really special that

all of these usually apply to adults and when you take this system to classrooms they meet mandatory participation Edulard meets grading practices hierarchies group dynamics and social roles a curriculum as well as space and time constraints and this is where it gets difficult because usually in larp in life role playing games uh you assume that people participate voluntarily and they always are free to step out of the game whenever they feel it's too much and of course there should never ever be Anyone telling them whether they're doing a great job a semi-good job or not

a good job at all well hierarchies include dynamics yes they do exist so that is well known from any social context but also having a curriculum and a teacher who is in charge of meeting curricular goals that is special and space and time constraints especially in germany we have 45 minute slots um And they have to be considered right we cannot just pretend they don't exist so in order to answer our question can angular be applied in schools we have to to find solutions for these for this framework and here is how we solved it

as of the space and time constraints we Said that any of our games can be conducted by one single teacher in one classroom within four lessons so four times 45 minutes when it comes to grading practices we ask the teachers not to grade the aguilar performance at all they would all students would get feedback on their performance mostly like a very positive feedback of course Um but also we had classes where they played up to five edularbs throughout one year and then they would get feedback over of how they developed and their personal progress um

as of the curriculum whenever we designed a nedular our learning objectives were extracted from that curriculum and every phase of the unit is cross-checked for its contribution to Achieving these goals participation is mandatory well it is mandatory in schools yet we always design for inclusion and opt out mechanisms um so any student should at all time at all times feel safe to say this is too much for me i'll have to step back a little bit i'll observe i'll watch and whenever i Feel like it i get back in and we had to convince the

teachers at first that this was something that would be possible and it was we never had any student like opting out a hundred percent like not wanting to join or even disrupting the game that never happened but we did have some who felt at times okay i'm making use of my out mechanism and then they would rejoin again and knowing this from The very first minute gave them a feeling of pro safety and ownership respect is a hard rule um and of course there are hierarchies group dynamics and whenever teacher and students meet even though

everybody is a character in a role there still is some hierarchy we could cannot do anything against that so we just accepted it and but we told Everyone um present that just for today they would meet as their characters and that actually broke up the uh the the hierarchies of the group dynamics that we had but more about that later when i get to the results so this is how we design our games um and we as soon as we Went out and talked to the teachers asked whether we could uh facilitate some edurbs in

their classrooms we realized well structures are required they everybody's asking like when are you doing it how long is it gonna take what are the goals okay so we could answer that uh concise descriptions were required um so we could not make a long story go back to larp and role playing and the Open method they really wanted to know what is it and what is it not um so we delivered that and learning objectives required and this concise description is another reason for me choosing the determine of the term stars instead of edular because

from my previous research and the interviews that i had conducted with edular experts i realized that edular is very open and it's Work in progress you know and it would uh and that is part of its definition at the same time it's impossible to go to to school and ask for doing a very open thing and you don't know um so yeah you understand me so i had to limit it a bit um getting a bit closer to traditional role-playing techniques that teachers Might know and then whenever we had a class where we conducted a

second and the third game we could be more open and more experimental and gently closer to to that concept of life being a technique where you really get to explore edges so what we always try to keep to any of our games in the design was the immersion The creativity and the social physical emotional and cognitive dimensions uh and then we had this very confined frame it was curriculum based the time frame was 45 minutes preparation 90 minutes the game itself and 45 minutes reflection plus i need to add that we would always give teachers

additional materials on how to work With the edular later on but these 45 19 45 minutes where the lessons that me and my team actually spent in the classrooms it would be possible to conduct the edularbs in the classrooms in in one classroom could be possible but usually we asked for for a second one just you Know in case we would have scenes in different places so um and that usually would work um one or two teachers as facilitators um would be a maximum we did not ask for any drama like previous drama skills and

no prerequisites no stage and no costumes sometimes we would bring Some props and like minor um like very reduced costumes you will see that in in the photographs later um [Music] and we as facilitators we usually had some kind of costume you'll also see that in a bit um And this is uh what i just explained the three phases and in the preparation we would talk about the scenario the the kids would develop the characters and usually they would get a very short character description with the possibility of like expanding on the characters themselves In

order to create ownership we would have improvisation exercises and even rehearse safety and meta techniques and tell them and that is super important uh of course they would be asked like why are we doing this is it really necessary do we have to and then we would tell them the the learning objectives and why we thought that just edular would be a good technique to get there Um usually the day after we would have the role playing itself uh first quickly introduced the rules like um especially remind them of being respectful towards each other and

then we would not interrupt them for the like yeah 80 minute larp and then we would have a very short it's yeah like a super short debrief where we separate the Players from characters usually by taking off their costumes saying goodbye to the characters uh and then in the next lesson either the same day or the next day we would have a debrief like emotionally how did it feel what was your best moment uh what did you dislike a reflection in terms of content and then tie the rope playing experience To their realities um like

maybe even to their everyday life and then finally come with the curriculum and transfer the experience to the learning goals [Music] and this is where you can see me and carolina and sebastian from my team they're about to we are about to start the larp The class is still outside having a break but soon they will enter and then the whole thing will start and this is for the eduard king that i will be introducing you to in a little bit before i do that let's have a look at the research um Everything i'm telling

you now you can find in the international journey of role-playing it's an article um published last year called the use of the roleplaying techniques stars in formal context and um that's just a short summary we had 16 edular and we played several of these edu larps several times in different classes with different groups to see how they would Be working um so we had 53 cycles in total out of these 16 edularbs we made sure that we tested the edular technique with all ages and all types of schools that we had a broad range of

topics and that we would always follow the design principle of one pedagogue and one classroom for the testing we Would be more people but then the scripts would end up being so reduced that one pedagogue could facilitate one eduard in one classroom because our idea was and still is um to have like an edular library one day where teachers just go grab a larp and play it with their Classes and then of course since teachers are super busy people it has to be they have to be able to understand it at one glance what is

it about what do i have to do okay and these uh just to show you uh the 16 larps these are the titles and today i oops I will be showing you these three uh and you can see here that these are the age ranges so we started with eight-year-olds and then we even had 14 16 euros we also had here hey um so how did we go how did i go about in the very beginning i talked to edular experts from all over The world some of whom are here today and i'm still forever

grateful because they explained me the concept of edular and they really shaped uh like a whole universe of what larp can be and then i understood that and my team and me we wrote those larps that i just showed you and some of those eduarps were also Written by live verizon the swedish team that i told you about and since they had that great experience and they already knew what would be working and what wouldn't and they wrote several of the games and after the games we would conduct interviews with the teachers we would have

feedback talks with the students and also surveys filled in by the students Um so we had it's both qualitative research and quantitative some statistics in those surveys just to show you the amount of material that we gathered it was 12 experts seven teachers 161 students and about 60 students that we had the feedback talks With um and these are some quotes that um the experts told me so you always have to tie it to life reality of the kids the language skills are going to increase phenomenally it's a good way of testing oneself in a

safe environment and it's a fun way of learning So knowing that we developed the design-based research i'm not going to go into that model too much because i'd rather take you to the classrooms now um so from what i had learned from the experts um we designed the edularbs Striving towards these goals so in terms of content we took that from the curricula and we wanted to in some cases teach them facts engage for the topic apply knowledge that they already had gained and we wanted to give them new perspectives on some topics um performative

skills would be trained creativity teamwork empathy and personal skills would also be developed Like um some students even expressed that they really gotten to know themselves better but they could do what they liked to do as of communication we had verbal nonverbal and paraverbal goals different registers in language uh for example when they had character like grown-up characters they would speak differently from what they would be speaking in Everyday life and we would also train spontaneous interaction which uh to today's digital natives is uh quite a thing actually like standing in front of each other

and communicating face to face and on top of that as a character so um that would be something We were trained for and then also in terms of the goals from the area of values education we would train respect responsibility tolerance appreciation and democratic structures um and this is another article from the scenario magazine which has as a title we chose the quote of a student who said i've gained Self-confidence um because in these feedback talks we asked them what what did you learn have you like in terms of transformation have you realized anything that

is different now than before and he's this person said yes i've gained self-confidence um [Music] in the surveys Um they mostly said that they had learned content-related [Music] issues that they had learned something about values their performance language so um and this is how they perceived their own learning we um this is Actually something that we were just about to do when uh corona came we wanted like in in order to test how much uh content how much content can we actually convey in larps we would have to have two classrooms and try to strive

towards the same learning goals with different methods we we're about to do that and then corona hit and We couldn't do it anymore uh so we will be looking deeper into the content related learning um [Music] another quote of a student 12 years i know now that i'm capable of much more than just sitting on a chair and listen to the teacher so again personal skills self-confidence And and the teachers perspectives are also interesting if you if you look at the bubbles here on the right um so according to teachers they felt that edu larp

was a really good tool to enhance performance skills empathy showing different perspectives on one topic but also social skills and teamwork Since we conducted this study in german lessons where it's a lot about language and literature in terms of language learning teachers felt that it was a really good tool to motivate writing activities since the students were having an uh they were not only having fun but they actually were immersed in a story were telling a story together and then for the writing they had a lot to talk about So that would motivate writing and

also a speaking interaction and yet so so summarizing teachers felt yes it's a good a meaningful tool to take curricular topics the students felt yes i'm learning a lot like social and personal skills yet There are many challenges that keep educators from applying the technique some of them no this is actually what the teachers mentioned and which we summarized so uh we call it infrastructure it's the time and place confinement because after a lot after these 90 minutes most of them felt like what do we have to stop already like we want to continue and

everybody Wished like teachers and students like everybody wished for more time which we didn't have another problem is verifying the effects like how do you actually see that they're learning something because grades might not be getting better next week just by conducting just by having attended a few edularbs so that would be something To look into then according to teachers uh they felt they didn't that they lost track of how much students were participating since teachers were participating themselves they could not really observe the students so they felt a bit of losing control here and

then the diversity the heterogeneity of the students that some were really engaged others were less they felt that that could be problematic And the same goes for reflection that some students were really engaging in the reflection while others were a bit quieter um yet if i can add but from my perspective i think what we're seeing here is something that just gets is very tangible in larps not everybody is participating when you're Reading a text or writing or writing an essay right somebody's writing more somebody else is writing less but in alarm it gets more

obvious and tangible and then teachers saw most problems in their own like rome they saw that it was quite a lot of Preparation no matter how much we reduced the larp script and how much were used on props and costumes they still felt woo that is uh quite a lot to prepare then the facilitation uh which goes together with role taking um they i mean they are already having a certain role as a teacher in a classroom and then swapping that for a character In the game they felt that that was quite a challenge um

yeah and then uh to to tackle the different students with their um needs and wishes that was quite a challenge as well finally let's Go to the classroom where we conducted king a wonderful aguilar written by my colleague janika hilgers oh sorry and the learning objectives are the appreciation of the learners various first languages and to understand the linguistic diversity to understand that they are speaking so many different languages Because the target group will learn as a foreign language of mixed ages and they had all um been to to germany for no longer than half

a year and they had no common language so they were all learning language at the same time as they were already engaging in different subjects and the word fields that we were focusing were multilingualism grocery shopping and fairy Tales competencies creative social interactive physical cognitive verbal and non-verbal interaction so but let's keep in mind that the appreciation of the learners various first languages were in the very center of the curricular learning um and in this in this game we have one village um in this village we have four families All family members work in three

factories and the narrative time span is three days there is a king a wise lady and servants and these were the characters that we would be embodying and we had in the game we had one problem the problem being should we speak one language or rather a multitude of language languages the king Would want to speak one language because he only knew german and the wise lady she felt there are several reasons for maintaining the multitude of languages and for speaking them and for learning from each other all these languages um so we got into

the classroom and this is the teacher attending as well And then again me sebastian and corolla sebastian as the king he was introducing um the the concept and the learning goals and corolla is now showing everyone the village what it looks like um together with the german words and we had rearranged no we had not rearranged the classroom um not yet but it's important to see that we have houses for the families marketplace in the middle And then the king uh to the upper left and then the factories students would get their characters and just

names and then they were asked to rearrange classrooms and in the reflections and surveys we learned that like rearranging furniture is one of their favorite things to do like almost in every larp we would get some feedback On rearranging furniture um so this is what they were doing you know building their the factories building the houses and then they would get a family tree um with uh when they filled in their names they were would be speaking about the constellations in their family um and learn them thereby learning that vocabulary as well And then we

had some pre-larp activities for building for trust building and also for um rehearsing some meta techniques and safety techniques like opting out and these i told you they would get minimal costumes and this is what they got like this white um stripe of cloth and each family would just wrap it around themselves in a Specific manner so that everybody else would know okay they belong to one family um and this is how we started okay we built a gate then each pair would go through the gate and once everybody had done that the larp started

and that day we actually had preparation and the game on one day Um this is the factory and they would start off slowly like we uh also learned that it's really good when we include some traditional learning methods in the larps like reading and writing activities they were already in character but they were doing like a domino and Filling in some text and then the wise lady would come you know she was at the marketplace selling her groceries um and uh being a bit sneaky and telling them what the king only wants you to speak

one language no you shouldn't be doing that and then she was also talking to the King um and the king proposed okay let's have a battle i will try to speak uh some language and you will have to convince me of how many languages you can speak and in the families and the factories they were teaching each other Their languages like which they really spoke in in real life um and the king uh would not be too happy to see that because of course he would realize oh no if they continue doing that i'm gonna

lose so he tried to um and he tried to to be really angry and and not let them do that And then we have the counter movement the wise lady who really encouraged them yes those are those so this is actually i don't have too many um pictures of the larp itself because we didn't want to disturb too much by taking pictures uh but this is actually the whole game you know like these two forces these uh like forced encounter force king and vice lady and in the end of course the students One you see

here the white lady is super enthusiastic um and since they won and the king agreed to having a multitude of languages um in his village they had a party and they bought groceries which were mainly candy and soft drinks from the wise lady and they had to to interact verbally here Very short debrief and reflection everyone taking off the costumes and thanking everybody else um and saying just how they felt i'm i i always call that a swedish round just because the concept is that everybody gets to say how they feel and this is not

to be commented on not by the teacher not by anybody else so they just Listen and they learn that okay people are feeling differently about this and that's perfectly okay um and then we left and came back for the reflection and um for learning how they perceived uh their various languages they had in the classroom and so many students said uh wow i never knew what other languages people were speaking i only knew that everybody was really poor in Speaking german but now i know that that there's such a variety and and it sounds so

great and i myself learn different um phrases or words so we we were really happy uh and the teacher also affirmed that we had reached the learning goals for this um so in a in a sense this is the perfect Setting for implementing an edular that we had at this school we had curious and brave teachers and students um none of them had ever learned or eduard before but they did and they did it with a lot of curiosity and fun we had a good atmosphere and a positive attitude towards one another which created a

safe environment and i think the safe environment can Really be created by giving the teacher lots of information that they recognize so knowing okay this is adapted to our time frames adapted to the curriculum that safety that gives implies some some safety on the teacher which in turn makes students feel safe um in the perfect setting we always Communicate clearly the learning objectives prior to the angular and how the edular contributes to clump of them we had enough time for reflection and the willingness to embrace ambiguities design and facilitation print principles that we could deduce

from this at your larp and all the other games were as follows Um the ones highlighted in red are the ones that are important in terms of safety but everything else is equally important um so it is important to communicate um the method choice and the learning goals and to let everybody know also the teachers that there is some degree of voluntariness um because if you don't feel at ease with the with what you're doing That negative feeling might actually um actually have an impact on your attitude towards the subject itself towards the class towards

the teacher so it might have lots of negative side effects so it's definitely super important to open up for opt-out techniques and voluntariness and these require training students are Not used to saying oh this is too much for me i i really would not want to participate um so it has to be trained and it can be done easily there are like we we have come up with several like five minute exercises for that um [Music] it's also important to let everybody know that varied feedback is appreciated That um and that the live-action role-playing itself

is either framed by traditional learning tools as i showed you before or that some traditional learning tools are in the game itself so they can recognize that and that also augments their safety it's important to vary the constellations to have group work in different constellations so in our Example the families would live together in their houses but in the factories they would work in different constellations and also levels of intensity should vary always design for a positive experience of course i mean we have games where basically everybody dies but still it could be a positive

experience it should be and that is really important limit on material props and costumes and Repetitions are advised because and when they teachers and students like when they play their first edgy larp they might feel a bit insecure not knowing oh am i doing what this team of people wants me to do um and then one once they have played their first eddie like they understand well whatever i'm doing is right and they want me to To own my character so repetitions are definitely advice because for the second third and so on larps they will

feel much safer and will expand more on characters and interaction um for designing the characters we noticed that short descriptions of characters and inclusive names were important constellations Should be inclusive and pre-set so rather than saying well find some people that you would like to be in in your family uh you tell them which characters are one family we also found that fictional and younger characters are tricky and that um the facilitator's character as well as the teacher's character they should be low-key and the students Should be in the limelight respect is a hard rule

i've said that several times all participants are on par and um yeah of course when you have 32 kids in one classroom um it may get very noisy and loud so it's important to find meta techniques Or to script the game in a way that it is easy to restore the focus um and our best practice i might actually close with this um and not go further than that um so our best practice for before during and after the game is as follows before the game it's really good to define and discuss the teaching goals

It's a bit of a repetition to what i've said before but it's more concise and at one glance train gestures communicate rules and opt out and train for constructive feedback because they might not not have learned that um and of course communicate the learning objectives [Music] To and this is very practical now like you would prepare delete all sources of variations like it's it says phones switched off okay that's usually the case in classrooms but we had so many people knocking on doors for whatever reasons you know and not because we were noisy or disturbing

but just you know somebody wanting to say hi or somebody delivering a letter whatever so it's Good to have the some sign on the doors and the curtains closed because things might be going on in the courtyard and then everybody's forgetting about the ideal herb yeah from these points yes acting character of course and um for the teachers we always ask them as facilitators to take the game seriously but act joyfully like of course they if they're having fun everybody else Dares to have fun as well um and sometimes students would like test them and

leave their character and address them with the real teacher name um but then we always encourage them to stay in character and just by staying in character giving a signal that nope this is not like a regular lesson we are Somewhere else now and by making mistakes show how to embrace them and if the teacher dares to make mistakes or dares to to laugh at his own interaction then students would dare to do the same thing and that last point here is a bit scary for teachers it says if a louder possible leave smaller groups

unattended For short periods of time to let them take responsibility so in our case of king he would be leaving the classroom uh and the wise lady would follow and the students were all by themselves um they would continue they would stay in character and realize well it's up to us like Nobody is telling the story for us we have we are supposed to tell our own story now and that really again gave them ownership um and they they grew by the year responsibility and by their the trust that they were given i've talked about

the um the after Uh after the edular um and i would have the example excuse me well i'll just quickly show you what it's about because it's a different setup uh different different from king and the accused has been written by life wagstan um and for this edular the curricular learning objectives were Social social structures in the middle ages they were supposed to learn historical language so the vocabulary of german at that time some of them and they had been reading a novel oscar and the secret of the kids that disappeared and they were supposed

to draw parallels in the novel there is uh one child being abducted by a poor Family um and in general we wanted them to empathize with the protagonist and have a change of perspective we had one class of 12 year old students in the lesson in the lesson of german and this accused is one of the games that we've played over and over and over again in different classes with the different groups um And uh the first scene is about three families which accuse peasants and poor families of theft child abduction witchcraft and insults the

mayor is the judge and what you're seeing here are the emblems of the family so they are very wealthy families and they always assist each other in accusing by pretending to having witnessed what has Happened um and in fact like that was on the character sheet like on the background story of the families they might not really have seen any signs of witchcraft maybe it was just the lady um picking flowers but they still felt we have to accuse that person Uh we to also to to show how powerful we are uh as a next

scene they win in court the judge tells them yes we were going to send all these families to jail that you've just been accusing so they are super happy over the triumph and they have a party at the mayor's house with food and snacks you see it's again food and snacks and We also learned that this um haptic sensorial experience really adds to the students experience in an edular and then they they also learn during that feast that the persons stay accused are in jail together with their families and they have to pay huge sums

of money they party on Until they suddenly get a slip of paper with their new character and that comes quite as a surprise now they are a member of the family they just accused they learned about their perspective and the motivations for their crime right the witchcraft the child abduction and the theft and lies we also had um and [Music] And that they they never ever wanted to commit any crime uh they would not even perceive that as having done anything criminal but yet now they were in jail and since they were really poor they

didn't have any money for for an attorney so they would draw a lottery uh before drawing lottery uh they in in That scene they would try to get out of jail by bribing the guard by bargaining the few possessions they had or by trying to escape uh none of that helped so they would draw a lottery about their fate what happened to them some succeed in escaping but they perish in the woods or die from diseases or hunger some succeed To escape and they get their reputation restored some fail remain in jail but survive some

fail remain in jail and do not survive um and since i was talking for a positive experience since it's a lottery and it was so random uh everybody realized wow this is so unfair If you were poor at that time there was just no way of getting a fair verdict and judge or at least not even of raising my voice and not even i would not even be allowed to tell my story and that was part of what we want like the social system during the medieval ages um and just an example of how we

tied this game To their realities we put up these sentences um on the board recently i just insulted recently i insulted somebody i've been insulted recently myself when i see somebody being insulted i take action and i treat everybody with respect and then we ask them to uh Consider whether any of these trances applied to themselves they were giving like little red dots and were asked to pin those thoughts to the sentence that they felt applied to themselves um and that's what they did and we can see clearly here that when only very few people

would intervene or Interfere whenever they saw itself an unfair situation was taking place so um they they reflected on that because we all know that this is what's most effective in in conflicts and in modern situations um and they also discussed a lot about uh the um these two conflicting um Utterances i treat everybody with respect many of them said they would be doing that but also many said i just insulted insulted somebody recently uh and then they would explain yeah well at home with my sister my brother oh we we communicate by insulting each

other um but there are other insults so i still that that is still like treating them respectfully so um we Had an interesting discussion about that um yeah and here we are again can i be applied in schools yes it can we have to reduce its openness and then it can very well be applied but i recommend as of now it be applied by external teams Just because we're seeing that also teachers are so much enjoying when somebody from the outside comes into the classroom and does this activity with their kids because they get to

see their students in a whole new um new setting interacting differently sorry i'm over time i will be closing shortly what are the effects on students We will be looking uh more into that in our research and the challenges um are as you've heard the system uh in terms of space and time confinement and um actually verifying the results did that aguilar really lead anywhere and where did it lead to but um We are getting closer here and we had for example one teacher that said well through this experience through immersing in a story their

writing is getting so much more detailed um not only is their motivation higher but also like when writing about the characters in accused for example uh they can really um express their feelings better by taking their perspective So whoo this is the further reading um and in in these articles uh of course you will find references to the amazing work that i'm i'm standing on that my research is standing on there there have been several great wonderful studies that Helped us putting together everything that i was telling you about today so um to mention our

photographer yannick uh janika again for designing king live racks done for the keys and the party well we'll save that for some other time um and if you ever want to get in touch i would be super happy capturing the Noise at lmu munich university where i'll be starting in two days so thank you so much for listening and i'll be uh glad to engage in discussions and to hearing your questions thank you so much that was so lovely and um so delightful to see the images as well i think sometimes this can feel so

abstract and having like the tangible this is what it actually looks like in The classroom can be helpful i also think um sometimes when people think of larp we assume it has to be like a huge production in order for it to work and as we can see it maybe it just needs a white sash and then they feel like they're in character so it's really great to see that um okay we have some questions coming in When talking about design principles you mentioned inclusive character constellations could you clarify what you mean by that yes

um just to stick to the example king because i've talked about that before um we we don't know the students before the the teacher would but we don't so we don't know who in these groups might want to engage more in the character who Might want to be to step a bit towards background so we gave them this family tree and then they could choose themselves like am i the the father or the mother in the family which who might also worry about which meals to cook and so on so they would engage more in

The game or am i maybe some granny or grandfather in the background that just is more observant and maybe supporting um so we would take we would consider that like how much they engage in the games that they could choose and also inclusive Inclusive characters yeah well it starts with the names already that name tags should not be male or female um we we went for like non-binary name tags um and also not only like typically german names but from different cultures i hope that answers your question do you or stars have any kind of

social media presence where we can learn more about your future work Yeah sure um i can put that in the chat of course and you will recognize some of the photographs meanwhile people are thanking you and saying it was a lovely educational lecture and an eye-opener that's good um someone is asking in the brazilian context especially in high school it is becoming increasingly common that a set Of four class periods with the same teacher doesn't even exist in this sense do you think it's possible to apply a shorter version with preparation role play and reflection

condensed into 50 minutes into how many minutes like 50 50 having fun uh yeah sure yeah um as one of my to quote one of the experts Uh that i did my initial work with um yes but please do have a reflection a thorough reflection of what happened so if you uh are very limited in time you rather skip the game and have the reflection that is of course an exaggeration that it shows how important the reflection is for the learning process so yeah sure you could Have like a 20 25 minute game and of

course you would not immerse deeply in characters and roles but you could still get a sense of what it's like to be in somebody else's shoes switch perspective um and just be it in the beginning for the preparation it would be a bit top down That you would be clear about the rules they would not be able to work on their characters a lot so they might just get their name and a sentence of who they are yeah yeah but i think it's possible um just from personal experience we've been doing role plays where maybe

like three minutes of role play and then like 20 minutes of reflection and that can actually be quite potent Too um if you have the right group that's up for that so um it's a very very potent tool um when when it's activated and when people are opted in as you described um someone is asking did any students or teachers express changes in how they felt about traditional learning exercises following the edgy larp experience yes in a sense that they said That edu larp was a perfect tool to complement traditional learning exercises so they would

never completely change to just edular but they said that they would definitely embrace having edulard in their learning processes in the classrooms a few times a year yeah because um they observed A positive social climate in their classrooms they observe that their relationship towards the students was different in a positive sense that they were getting closer in a way because they had a shared positive experience now um [Music] and And a third the holistic experience because school in at least in bavaria is still very cognitive it's brain heavy and to experience yourself and everybody else

with all your senses um and interacting non-verbally um that was something that they wish that their students to experience yes i love what you had to say about the Teacher and student experience because so often we forget that that's a relationship dynamic that's occurring too and one of the things that edgy larp is so good at is shifting up those social hierarchies that we talked about so maybe it can there is more playfulness that's possible between teacher and student um that way yeah definitely Um somebody's asking well thank you for your presentation very much enjoyed

the findings and insights you talked about love your approach of richness and asset to diversity of languages in the classroom did you by any chance hear from students about the impact of this edular king on their perception over time after finishing the education i wish we had Um no unfortunately not um for different reasons like the the teacher um had to uh to go to another school so she had to leave that class and then we could not keep in touch with a specific class unfortunately but that would be so interesting to have follow-ups um

We had follow-ups with other groups uh like a year later and we asked them like what changes did you perceive and they were mostly on a personal level regarding their like confidence self-esteem um and also their verbal and non-verbal expression so i would assume that we would have heard a lot about that and their perspective on their own languages and and How they perceive that everybody else's language but unfortunately but yeah i hope that i can give you an answer in the future we were talking a second ago about inclusion and um it seems like

a very uh culturally relevant practice to that can actually lend to inclusion where people can bring their own cultural experience into the classroom Rather than being told this is what culture is and this is what you're supposed to be learning would you agree with that based on your observation of the students very much so definitely yes and that is is such a that empowerment comes very by surprise um and i think it would be super interesting to hear About edulard in different cultural contexts because as i experienced school in sweden it was more open more

playful more creative and the students already had more ownership in regular traditional traditional classrooms um and then it would be interesting to hear how they perceive edu larp is that also em empowering um and is that a culture um Or is that just well as anything else yeah your research study would be very interesting especially for these um like you have a pretty considerable sample size at this point and a lot of these edgy larp interventions are maybe in one class or you know one teacher that's doing it over time so when there's a large

sample size where there's a lot of students Especially in the swedish system that have experienced edular then we can actually get some pretty interesting quantitative data as well um as you know maybe see some patterns over time yeah yeah that sounds like a great project definitely maybe we can talk more about it um so i have some questions you mentioned That some of the children would opt out briefly but not opt out completely what were some of the reasons that they chose to opt out well the like the real reasons i don't know like we

always have what they tell us right um what we could observe was that when it got really noisy you know like when we were having the party and accused you know like we Had music playing and everybody like 30 people chatting at a time then some people felt woo this is overwhelming that's too much so this could be one reason just you know two too many impressions at once um then another reason would be that in some scenes they would not know What was going to happen so we have intergalactic and again taking place in

outer space and there are some interstellar pirates and they the the group learns that oh there is a threat like pirates are approaching what can we do about it and that threat even though it was very in game and very not close to home still felt threatening To some and they felt like now let me observe a little bit and that's fine and i'm i'm so glad to be able to say that after these 53 cycles we never lost a single student so they always would rejoin and seeing that yeah it's the same thing and

even though the pirates might be invading our ship it's still safe to to do that to to to be part of The simulation would you coach them back into the game or would you just sort of let them have their overwhelm and and until they sort of were able to re-engage themselves um we would observe them and then at some point in time sometimes we would encourage them to rejoin or Mostly they would just quietly by themselves and get back to their whatever group they were having a family or and that is another design principle

i did not mention too much today but it's so important that they have at least one positive relationship so somewhere they can go back to um it could be a family it could be a yeah the factory in the example Like in my experience uh in doing organizing and safety work um people get overstimulated a lot it might be bleed you know like you were describing maybe they feel actually threatened even if it's you know a fictional scenario or or there's just too many things going on and they're not sure what to engage with and

so sometimes just having that little push of why don't you try this thread this seems to interest you a lot or in this case like why don't you go to that Person that you know who's your best friend in the game and that can sometimes give them that lifeline back into the fiction yeah can you give any examples of the opt-out mechanisms you practice with the students in advance and how do you prevent quote unquote abuse of these mechanisms um the second part the Abuse which i guess could be that they opt out too much

or all the time just for to to be silly and that never happened um [Music] just because i think they they might not be used to opting out of something in a school context they usually do what they're being told to do um And some mechanisms would be let me think uh yeah like um like shadowing your eyes like that and just retreat and that would be a signal for everybody else that well okay now i'm not my character anymore chip uh and then they would just stand back close to some to wall and observe

um and that needs to be rehearsed because sometimes in the beginning we Only told them well this is what you can do and then you cover your eyes and then you just leave and nobody will ask you and nobody will ask any questions uh you will be safe and by yourself um but nobody would be doing it sometimes they would just approach us and say well i don't want to be part of that anymore so we realized we have to rehearse like Everybody doing that and making it a very natural thing to do even the

teachers and then then it worked so that is one example so like having it be part of the workshop where they have this embodied sense of what it feels like not just a cognitive understanding of it exactly and i i also noticed you were talking about um Sort of they can decide the level of participation that they want to go for are they are they playing a central role or are they playing more good of a tangential role and that might help some people stay engaged as well especially if they have performance anxiety they can

still be part of the game they still have a place in the fiction but they don't necessarily have to be the primary driver um is that your experience as well yeah Definitely and uh they so we also realized that they are reluctant to this they they don't really buy it when we just start saying yeah you it's totally up to you how much you want to engage they go like yeah okay you can say that but i don't believe you but then once they realize this is how it is even uh Students who were opting

for more like brownback characters they would engage totally um and just by knowing that it's their ownership and they always can decide taking this step back or forward that would help um you mentioned this i found so fascinating in your data you mentioned that content related learning was so High out of all of those scores which is interesting because i've heard other azure larp experts say that that's the one thing that's hardest to train which is content mastery and you know kind of going back to the previous question about um you know traditional learning techniques

you were talking about how this needs to be paired with traditional learning techniques of some sort before and after to to prepare them for that so um i was Really interested in what your perception was of their learning in terms of this content familiarity or mastery is it that they perceive that they're learning it or did you notice that they were actually learning it um i noticed at during the very game they were using for example this medieval language we had like posters set up in the classroom With certain expressions on how to greet each

other in medieval german and they were using those and then in the reflection we asked them since it was one of our learning objectives uh did you do you feel that you've learned something about medieval language and the way like yes um then i think that students are trained on content knowledge on perceiving content knowledge it's not So much that they realize how much they were interacting and how much they were learning about themselves how they express themselves so that would be something that once it is introduced there's a specific learning goal like non-verbal interaction

for example or social skills to ask them specifically about that how do you perceive any changes in that But it's difficult um because it's so difficult to measure i have to rely on self-reports which you know can may or may not reflect what's actually happening but i still think they're super valuable because even if somebody believes that they've gained more self-confidence as you mentioned that's huge um it really is it can mean a world of difference in terms of Their ability to succeed in life to pursue their goals yes and it can spark like a

whole change of positive experience because then in the school uh environment they feel safer they feel safer in the very subject with the teachers so it can definitely um beer grounds for trinidad transition um and transformation Of course what we're trying to get to here is like okay what's what's the spark because the game isn't necessarily the point it's great it's wonderful but like what's the spark that then will jettison them into you know different levels of achievement or different levels of self-worth or whatever it is that the goals are expression being able to i

love hearing about the students being able to express themselves so much more because they're Writing about their characters that's my experience as well it's like once i'm in character then all of a sudden i have a lot to say that's wonderful to see them engage so much without any constraints and without you know like taking away the the pressure of having to perform in a certain way in order to get a certain grade taking away all that pressure uh makes even the teachers see All different persons in the classroom and i think this is why

it's so valuable for teachers as well that they suddenly see the person behind the student yeah that's that's really great one very short final question you mentioned games where everyone dies so i'm super intrigued can you give us an example and let us know how the children responded to that um [Music] yeah they they respond in a positive way if everybody dies otherwise they as an accused when not everybody dies but like half of those being in jail um they feel it's unfair but then they immediately realized well it was super unfair like the system

at that time is So unfair and you like you could be so blessed to live and nowadays in in a system that at least tries to establish like equal um social positions uh in as good as you know what i mean as much as possible um yeah i i remember Games where everybody dies they were written by live works done and i felt like wow we can't do that in german classrooms maybe it would work in sweden but it couldn't work for german classrooms um and then we carefully tried it out and it does and

i think the the students are very used to uh to fiction where were the dying characters like even the good guys like so it's not too um Too heavy and it adds a lot to their experience like knowing that okay something has set an end for my character now well thank you so much for this wonderful lecture i'm just always so blown away by how organized your thought is and how procedural you can explain all of the steps while also going into so much rich depth so thank you so much for sharing that with us

Today thank you so much for having me and thanks everyone in the audience for listening bye-bye yeah and please get in touch in case you want to embark on a new study in case you want to share edularfs we're happy to share even though i have to warn that we only have very few larps in english they would be in german Yeah but still we're happy to to cover you