Role-Playing the Public Voice to Integrate Teaching & Service

Love them and/or despise them, role-playing is one of the most effective strategies for developing a public theological voice. You can use role-plays in many different ways in your classes to inspire public theology while illuminating course content.

You are a public intellectual. Public intellectuals are responsive—in public—to current events.  This is part of our public service. Serving as a responsible public intellectual requires (1) having something intelligent to say and (2) being the right person to say it.

Which issues demand your public response? When are you the right person to respond? When are you not the right person to respond? Engaging these questions in the seminary classroom helps prepare students and us for the service of public theology.

Reflection on current events through role-plays reveals no shortage of moral quandaries, no limits of ethical dilemmas. Paying attention to what pastoral theologians call “lived human experience” reveals endless source material for course role-plays to practice public response.

Role-Play Pedagogy: Five Steps

Writing role-plays into one’s pedagogy is a skill.

1. Prepare the Group through trust building and risk assessment.  Connect every role-play to course learning goals. Accept the forced nature of the “pretend” exercise.  Know that play and real struggle intermix in unexpected ways.
2. Write the Role-Play by paying attention to gender/race/age/class/geographical assumptions. You need to preserve anonymity.  Be clear.  Include enough but not too much information. Students often say: “but I need to know more!” This reminds us that one always enters situations in the middle and rarely from the very beginning.  At the same time, the point is not to minimize life’s complexity, but to focus on careful engagement.
3. Prepare the Role Play Format.  Will this role-play work better in pairs or as a whole group?  How far into the semester are you?  Will you include a written component or link the role-play to a term paper?
4. Schedule Enough Time for the Role Play.  I often devote half of a three-hour class session to role-play and debriefing.  An entire session is not too long for a more in depth role-play.
5. Reflect and Follow Up. Be open to surprise. Does this require your public response now? Are you the right person? Are you not the right person?  How does the role-play support and challenge course concepts?  When a dynamic or issue is too raw – what pastoral theologian Emma Justes calls a “not that issue!”—note this as an area of personal growth but not yet public engagement. After class, take time for what you learn in the role-play to generate new writing and thinking that can inform your teaching and publications – helping with the integration problem.

In-Class Role-Playing

I use small group role-play throughout the semester in pastoral care classes to connect pastoral and prophetic ministry, practice making a referral, and engage challenging topics of grief and violence. My general format is five minutes of interaction, two minutes of quick debriefing, five minutes of continued interaction, and whole class discussion.

Whereas small groups do multiple role-plays at once, in a fish bowl the whole class participates in one role-play by switching in and out of roles.  I usually allow an hour to debrief.  I have found this format helpful to connect theories or history to contemporary practice in ethics, practical theology, and history courses.

Individual Role-Playing

Role-play can also invite individual student response. Here’s an example:

A college student recently published an open letter in the local paper protesting the school’s public announcement of a fiercer mascot and asked for an open conversation about sexualized violence on campus. Almost immediately, this open letter and the student became the subject of a bitter national conversation. As a part time minister in the area, do you (a) do nothing and wait it out, (b) start a small conversation, or (c) go public by publishing a response?

This role-play was right out of the current news during the semester (see here , here, here , here, and here), although few students had been aware of it. Above, I masked the University and details about the student, and later in the debriefing shared the primary sources and my email correspondence with UConn administration about using this case for my class.

The final exam essay format asked individual students to respond using course concepts. We had practiced this as a class before the exam.  Most students crafted additional options beyond the three listed. Many realized the need for more information for responsible public engagement.  Yet, doing nothing did not satisfy either.

In debriefing as a class, we realized the effort needed to take seriously the range of sources and sound byte nature of national media.  We noted needing good referrals ready before making a public comment. How would you begin to engage this case out of your academic discipline?

Risks and Benefits

Any issue worthy of public theological engagement involves discernment: Why this issue? Why you? Why now? Practicing public engagement in the classroom setting around challenging issues helps engage questions of vulnerability and power.

Role-plays elicit student/class vulnerabilities and performance anxieties.  Other times, they reveal knee-jerk reactivity or defensiveness not appropriate for public theology.  When grief, violence, and systemic injustice are topics of public conversation, there is risk of triggering past and present painful experiences. Role-plays always deepen learning, even when they don’t go according to plan. Whole class debriefing is essential to the process.

Public intellectuals need a responsible public voice.  We owe it to ourselves and our students to practice this voice in the classroom so that class content can inform public comment while students become self-aware about when they are the right person to speak up.

Photo Credit: “IMG_8859.jpg” by Jens Baitinger – CC by 2.0

  [sociallocker] [/sociallocker]

 

Add to favorites