Everyone is the hero of their own story: does role-play have a place in the social studies classroom?
Throughout my career as a civics teacher, I have loved running Mock Congress in my classes. Research has shown that simulations can help students learn political concepts and can help them better function as members of a democratic society (e.g. Parker and Lo 2016). It can force students to evaluate the potential validity of the other side–and as a result, better understand their own positions.
At the same time, educators must be careful when running simulations–both in terms of the content of the simulation and the structure. Clearly, we should not ask students to simulate events like a slave auction or the middle passage, which both trivialize real historical trauma and can create new trauma in the classroom. But having students debate other current events like marriage equality or voter identification could still make students deeply uncomfortable and actually stifle student learning.
Photo by Matthew Bornhorst on Unsplash
To try to figure out how to structure simulations and role-play based learning, I talked with theatre educator Ian Finley, who spent 18 years teaching theatre at the Burning Coal Theatre Company and Research Triangle High School in North Carolina. Incorporating theatre techniques into history teaching seemed like a natural fit. Just as “everyone is the hero of their own story,” in theatre, so, too, are historical figures. There are certainly unlikeable, bad people in plays, but good theatre also tries to complicate and humanize the villains; the villains of history are not just cartoonishly evil but have their own motivations for doing what they do.
A good Mock Congress simulation is alive and full of humor and gravity–in part because the way our government runs is often absurd, even when discussing serious topics. Just replicating the recent GOP Speaker debacle could produce hours of drama and fun for students, and a recent exchange between a Republican senator and the Teamsters president that almost led to fisticuffs in a committee hearing was sophomoric, at best.
But while mocking Congress can make for a fun Mock Congress and can help us to deflate those who have power, it doesn’t necessarily allow students to build empathy for and understanding of sides with whom they disagree. Students may fall into the trap of acting out their character insincerely. “We do it for the shock value. I’m going to argue the Trump position because I know it will troll other people,” Ian says. “The dangerous thing is…those people who want to argue a position solely to make other people feel uncomfortable about it.”
Secondly, many of the issues that come up in a Mock Congress might be deeply personal to students. In their 2017 book The Case for Contention, Jon Zimmerman and Emily Robertson ask, “Should we debate recent ‘religious freedom’ initiatives that would give citizens the right to discriminate against gay couples — even though some students might have gay parents, or might be gay themselves?” Would it be okay to have a Muslim student playing a conservative in favor of a Muslim ban, or a conservative Christian student playing the role of a pro-choice Democrat? Students may be deeply uncomfortable playing the role of someone who hates them or seeing a classmate playing the role of someone who is opposed to their very existence.
Yet, these views also exist in mainstream political discourse. It would be unproductive–and also boring–to pretend like these people don’t exist. They challenge our own sense of morality and force us to consider that even people with whom we have strong disagreements might have some redeemable characteristics. And in thinking deeply about the other side, we help students sharpen their own beliefs. Ian argues that “if you really believe in anything enough to make an argument for it, you make that argument by really listening to the other side…And find those places [that are most reasonable], and that way you really know…what you’re up against, you know, what their best arguments are because you yourself found that they were reasonable in some way.”
In order to do this, though, Ian suggests building students up to debating about identity politics. “Let’s talk about budgets first,” Ian says. “It might be the most important thing, but it’s drier….And only once people are used to arguing the other thing begin to move toward those things that touch upon actual identity, because God knows most of our students don’t have their identity yet. They are working through a series of different identities to find out which of them is a part of it.”
But just scaffolding the content of the simulation only gets at part of the problem. “The ‘what’ speaks to the head, and the ‘how’ speaks to the heart. You can say just about anything in a way that is reasonable, you can say just about anything in a way that is inflammatory,” Ian says. It can be helpful to place guardrails on the kinds of rhetoric that students use in the simulation, placing limits on speech that, while present in our democracy (and frequently on the floor of the House and Senate), is antithetical to democratic discourse. “While [guardrails] are insincere and don’t fully represent what is happening in American politics right now, they may be more instructive. For instance, inflammation for the sake of inflammation–incendiary rhetoric without substance–should be banned. Banning certain rhetorical devices and trolling.” Ian argues that by naming and outlawing rhetorical devices meant to inflame, it can force students to resolve political conflicts better, and perhaps emulate an ideal (albeit artificial) form of political discourse.
Finally, creating rituals–and employing the idea of “the frame” from theatre–can help students pivot from their role-play back to the real world and reflect on the simulation as a learning experience, while also making it easier for students to act their parts. “The basic idea [of the frame] is that when you cross this sort of membrane from the world to the stage, there’s a separate set of rules,” Ian says. “And that is why we have a literal physical barrier, right? Even if it’s tape on the floor…These people and may and will in fact say things that we don’t believe while we’re inside of this tape to better understand and sharpen the things we do believe on the other side of the team. But importantly, we leave that character inside the tape….You can’t be daring on stage if it’s the same world old.”
In addition to establishing some kind of physical barrier between the simulation world and the “real” world, it can also be helpful to establish rituals and routines to help students transition between the two. “It’s part of the reason why we always did the warmup before drama class, right?….So if you have a series of, you know, three questions before and three questions after that can be dealt with in a very superficial way, that gives us a space to delve more deeply when we get to the more significant stuff.”
As a teacher, while I have loved running Mock Congress, I have found that I struggle with “the heart” element of role-play activities–I am so focused on getting students to understand competing points of view that I sometimes forget the real distress that our national political climate is causing students. And I think this is a place where social studies teachers could learn a great deal from theatre teachers. When our national leaders regularly troll and humiliate their opponents on a public stage, how can we be surprised that our teenagers, too, participate in causal cruelty on a regular basis. So perhaps the goal of the simulation, then, should be less about simulating what Congress actually looks like and instead helping students to realize what democratic discourse ought to be like.
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Time for some shameless self-promotion. I love running Mock Congress in my classrooms, and over the last year, I have developed a web app called Article 1, which makes it easy for teachers to run Mock Congress. And right now, you can get 50% off of Article 1 by using the code BACKTOSCHOOL2023.
