Magister Educationis - MEd / Role-play is a teaching strategy which is very useful in enhancing the acquisition of knowledge and conceptualisation of some topics in Life Science. According to the theory of constructivism, learning science is a process in which learners construct understanding of the materials. Role-play and constructivism are intertwined, yet role-play as a teaching strategy lacks classroom application in the teaching of Life Sciences. Role-play is not often used in the teaching of Life Sciences, and to be specific, in the teaching of the circulatory system. The study is motivated by learners’ misconceptions of the circulatory system. The study is undertaken to determine the effect of role play on the learners’ conception about the human circulatory system. Random sampling resulted in the selection of one out of 6 grade 10 classes with 49 learners in each from one school in the Metro East District in Cape Town.

Supportive fan bases in live events are more than casual viewers. They are the result of an active audience who have shifted the power dichotomy between producers and viewers via their range of participation. Drawing from scholars like Jacques Ranciere, Henry Jenkins, and Adam Alston, this essay uses Evermore Park in Pleasant Grove, UT, as a case study to review levels of engagement within spectatorship, and particularly how fandom can lead to audience takeover of immersive spaces. Evermore Park is a unique site that sits at the intersection of all three performance genres--immersive theater, park studies, and live action role-play. It is ripe for takeover as the producers encourage audiences to participate in increasingly liberal ways. This paper specifically focuses on the powerful position of the "fan" to contest producers and take over the space through their influence over the narrative, costume design, and online presence.

This research paper examines students’ perception of how role-play could affect their confidence in accordance with their speaking ability in EFL/ESL- classrooms. It has tried to respond to the research question “To what extent do Swedish EFL/ESL- students find role-play helpful for their confidence in their speaking ability?.” In addition, an analysis of relevant research supported the theoretical background on the subjects of Second language acquisition (SLA), Communicative language teaching (CLT), the Sociocultural perspective and the steering documents from Skolverket. Moreover, the research used a qualitative method through interviews. The interviews were performed with eight students from 7th-9th grade. To complement the study a questionnaire was conducted to show the distribution of students confidence on a scale from 1-5. The collected data was from a role-play activity that was tested similarly in six EFL/ESL-classes. At the end of the classes, they were evaluated in a Google Formula. Then, it was possible to see connections between the level of confidence and how helpful role-play was for the students. In the result, the interviewees all agreed on the role-play possibly being a helpful tool to improve the speaking ability. In addition, the questionnaire showed that 64% of the participants thought that role-play helped them to speak more confidently in English. Also, it was shown that students in the middle of the scale were the ones that found role-play most beneficial. At last, the factors that seemed to develop students’ confidence the most from the role-play were the structure of a group, the chosen themes, and the support students received from the framework.

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In the last ten years there has been a resurgence of interest in teaching Shakespeare through performance. However, most literature on the topic continues to focus on the pragmatic selling points of how performance makes Shakespeare fun and understandable while remaining surprisingly silent on issues of theory and ethics. By investigating the ethical implications of performance pedagogy as it affects our students' construction of identity, empathy, and pluralistic tolerance we can better understand and discuss the potential of performance pedagogy in relation to the ethical goals of the Humanities. Performance Pedagogy has particular ethical potential due to the structure of performance and the effects of role-play on a student's identity. Lessons learned in the fictional world of a play can be transferred to real life allowing learning to take place in a world of more flexible rules and without real life consequences. Further, role-play also creates a unique blending of actor and character that encourages a compassionate rethinking of self and other. Although imperfect in its empathy, this emphasis on connection is still a moral alternative to the dehumanizing effects of seeing others in terms of complete alterity. Lastly, because performance encourages interpretation, it is a fruitful tool to encourage pluralism, a much-needed philosophy for our students today and one that in relation to Shakespeare can render particularly humanizing ends. Such a discussion of the ethical effects of performance pedagogy itself also focuses on principles of connection that ought to be applied to all scholarly endeavors in order to increase their meaning and morality.

“Playing pretend” is often regarded as childish, but many people continue to role-play well into adulthood through various forms of games, activities, and experiences that become an established part of societal norm. In this study, I attempt to establish links between marginalized identities, self-discovery, self-acceptance, and role-play. My findings may help in development of serious and applied games, as well as role-play’s use in therapeutic settings. I surveyed players online from a specific Art Role-Playing Game (ARPG) community, Pouflons, to find out how their characters’ personas and identities spillover and bleed into the player’s primary identity. Existing literature has reported instances of bleed between character and player identity, but usually in an autoethnographic report, small study, or only in theory. I intended to confirm the phenomena of identity bleed and emancipatory bleed by using a larger sample size, at 138 complete responses. I found that this community had a large population of people identifying as LGBT and that a clear majority of players report that their identity has been affected by their role-play.

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The relationship between pedagogy and self-efficacy beliefs is at the core of this dissertation. A continued demand for mental health service providers who can handle challenging caseloads requires novice professionals who are both well prepared and confident in their own skills and abilities, as self-efficacy is a positive predictor of performance. Since experiential learning opportunities are considered particularly beneficial to fostering self-efficacy beliefs, two cohorts of graduate students in a beginning psychotherapy course who engaged in different experiential learning activities were compared in terms of their counseling self-efficacy growth over the course of one semester. One cohort of students engaged in scripted role play during the semester, while the other cohort engaged in unscripted role play. Additionally, focus group discussions with students from both cohorts were conducted after the conclusion of the semester where students reflected on their experiences. Multiple regression analysis was performed to test the hypothesis that students in the treatment group, who engaged in scripted role play, would show greater growth in counseling self-efficacy beliefs. The results did not confirm the hypothesis; students in the treatment group, however, preferred the scripted role play over unscripted role play and reported overall less anxiety about performing the client role. Given the small sample size of 27 students overall, a replication with a larger sample is needed. The results of this study might be considered a starting point to investigate further how to optimize experiential learning pedagogy to foster self-efficacy growth in the classroom.

Auditing literature recently identified what has been termed a "social mismatch" between novice auditors and older, more experienced, more knowledgeable client contacts (Bennett and Hatfield 2013). This phenomenon occurs when novice auditors avoid face-to-face interactions with clients and can adversely affect the audit process. In light of the importance of novice auditor-client interactions, I conduct an experiment to identify potential mechanisms to mitigate the social mismatch phenomenon. Specifically, accounting students proxying for novice auditors are randomly assigned to experimental conditions in which they participate in role-play and perspective-taking exercises and complete an audit task commonly performed by novice auditors. Initial findings indicate that role-play interventions, such as those currently used in training at large public accounting firms, may exacerbate novice auditor inhibition tendencies. Furthermore, additional results suggest that actively taking the client's perspective prior to choosing an evidence gathering technique does not improve novice auditor decisions. Finally, auditor inherent characteristics are studied, including levels of emotional intelligence and impression management, and also do not appear to have implications for selection of evidence gathering techniques. Results of this study provide valuable insight into novice auditor-client interactions, as well as the implications of such interactions for audit evidence gathering activities. / Ph. D.

The suspension of disbelief is integral to the performing arts. We ask our actors to see couches made of three chairs, designers to create cities in empty spaces, and most of all; we ask audiences to believe the stories and relationships that are figurative and often abstract. This level of critical and creative engagement is assumed to develop in spaces of higher education. However, with an ever-changing world and increasing conversions and integrations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in spaces of higher education, it has become even more apparent that students need to develop their creative and critical thinking skills earlier on in their development. By recontextualizing learning through imaginative immersive game systems, such as Dungeons & Dragons and similar tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs), I have found that students experience categories of significant learning synergistically through experiential gameplay. This immersive storytelling relies entirely on the player-performers to spend their disbelief and immerse themselves in their imagination, termed theatre of the mind. The gamification of role-play acts as a means of challenging students to activate their development of collaborative improv, storytelling/playwriting, and dramaturgy skills. Through research and play testing, I have developed a gamified drama-focused role-play educational tool utilizing many of the core gameplay mechanics in the world's most popular TTRPGs. In this thesis, I present the game structure and reflect upon my experiences implementing this work. Additionally, I explore the cross sections between game design and immersive theatre practice and consider how this intersection is utilized in gamified performance and pedagogy. Finally, I consider how a theatre-of-the-mind-based pedagogy can be utilized in subjects outside of the theatre classroom.