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Role-Playing for Inclusivity: Recommendations for Using Role-Playing Activities in Sociology Classrooms

Dr Alanna Gillis

Assistant Professor

St Lawrence University

[Abstract: Instructors today seek to use active learning teaching practices to engage students in content that may be difficult to understand, and role-playing activities are a common strategy to enable students to analyze the interplay of structure and agency in people's lives. This presentation will analyze why role-playing activities are more inclusive than practices like privilege walks (which force students from disadvantaged identities to share that with their classmates, as well as prioritizes the learning of the privileged students over their less privileged peers). By using specific and concrete examples from my own teaching, I will unpack how to implement role-playing activities in the classroom and use them to achieve your learning objectives. Additionally, I will discuss the pitfalls to avoid, including how to avoid your students engaging in (metaphorical) blackface, why some topics (like the slave trade) should not be taught as role-playing activities, and what logistical details need to be accounted for to enable success (like how to deal with the uncertainty of student attendance or how to use role-playing activities in remote courses).]

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What are Role-Playing Activities?

Active learning exercise
Assign imaginary roles within a fictional constrained society
Students have some freedom to make choices

Role creates different constraints for different students

Different consequences occur, based on different choices

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Why are Role-Playing Activities Useful?

Allow them to “experience” complex scenarios
Explore society from a different perspective
Especially useful for examining interplay of structure and agency

Students see that making choices doesn’t mean people have full agency
Analyze the impact of seemingly individual choices

Students usually find them fun, so engage deeply during activity & in discussion afterwards

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Example 1: School Choice & Inequality Example

Learning objective: Analyze how school choice increases racial and social class segregation
Role-playing activity:

Family profile: race, income, distance from schools, etc.
Task: decide which school to send your child to
Analyze: different choices made by different “families” & how structures guided them toward unequal outcomes

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Example 2: Social Networks & Labor Market Inequality

Learning objective: Analyze how social networks contribute to labor market inequality
Role-playing activity:

Profile types: job seekers and employers
Task: Job seekers try to get hired; employers try to hire best employees
Analyze: how social connections helped some people meet employers sooner & have higher likelihood of being hired

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Role-Playing & Inclusivity

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Why Some Inequality Activities are Not Inclusive

Privilege Walk relies on disadvantaged students to “out” themselves in various ways
Why Should Not Use It

Can tokenize experiences
Forces revealing (or lying) about highly personal information
Prioritizes privileged student learning

Privilege walks and other similar activities try to teach students about inequality by having students “step forward” or backward based on whether they have experienced certain things in their lives, such as sometimes having to go to school hungry because you couldn’t afford food or having been evicted from your home. While it’s often touted as a great way to learn about invisible inequalities that students around you have experienced that you might not have known, the essence of the activity relies on marginalized students outing themselves in various ways in order to achieve that. For instance, I am bisexual, and most recently was dating a woman. While I sometimes choose to self disclose things like discrimiantion I’ve faced because of it, in this type of classroom setting I would either be forced to reveal that information or be forced to lie about it–neither of which creates an environment in which I feel included in the classroom.

Instead, it often makes marginalized students feel tokenized, as their experiences become the object of learning for their privileged students. Students from privileged backgrounds often express that they have their eyes opened from this kind of activity, as they didn’t realize some of the experiences others faced, but at the price of objectifying and alienating their class members who became the object of study rather than fellow learners.

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How Role-Playing Activities Overcome Those Problems

Take on roles with social characteristics, not their own
No personal disclosure is required
Equally valuable for all students

Everyone gets to analyze how structures are impacting their choices
No one in classroom is token or object of study

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Role-Playing Pitfalls to Avoid

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Not All Topics Are Appropriate for Role-Playing

Avoid reenacting decisions that led to extreme trauma!

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(Metaphorical) Blackface and Cultural Appropriation

Debate about having students role play as real historical figures

Common tool: “Reacting to the Past”

Problem?

Students may engage in racist or other stereotypes in which to get “into character”

Solution?

Consider whether real person is needed
If so, discuss in advance why and how to avoid engaging in stereotypes

Example: I TA’d for a course that used Reacting to the Past to help students understand decisions and actions made in different historical eras, focused on New York in 1910’s and then India in the 1940’s. Students were assigned either real people or composite characters including reading their past work in order to prepare to play that role. It effectively helped students unpack the constrained choices faced by different interest groups and different political leaders, as well as different strategies for social change. However, a student in the course a few years later objected to the activity, calling it blackface for her white classmates to role-play as Black leaders, including the reliance on stereotypical Black stereotypes and ways of speaking.

Thus, if you’re considering doing role-playing activities, it’s best to consider whether a real person rather than composite or fictitious profile is appropriate, Additionally, you need to have a discussion with students in advance of starting the role-playing portion about what is appropriate (trying to make decisions consistent with your character’s objectives) and what is not appropriate (using racist or other stereotypes to promote it, or especially to be “funny”)

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Logistical Considerations

Group vs Individual Roles

Group= predictable attendance matters less; allows students to think through their decisions together
Individual= more interactive and useful if different people are trying to achieve different, conflicting goals

Students need resources in advance to make realistic choices
Requires a lot of planning and structure in advance

In terms of logistical considerations, I’ll briefly mention a few here and then you’re welcome to ask more questions.
One thing you’ll need to consider when creating a role-playing activity is whether you want to use group or individual roles. Each have pros/cons. Group roles means that predictable attendance matters less–if you plan for all groups to have roughly four people but only three show up, that’s fine. It also forces students to actively discuss and debate the decisions they will make, helping them move past their own initial preferences or ideas to truly what their role would do.
Individual roles can be more interactive and useful especially if you want to set up a competition of sorts with students having different competing jobs (like the job market activity I described earlier). More roles gives more opportunity for creativity and student competition among roles. However, you have to try to predict how many students will be in attendance–in my case, I create a few bonus roles, ones that aren’t critical to the activity’s success and give those out last in case fewer students than expected show up.
Another consideration is that students need resources in advance to make realistic choices. For instance, if they are role-playing as college admissions staff (a common activity downloaded in TRAILS), then they need to have been provided a reading or lecture material in advance giving them some indication about what college admissions staff must take into account. Otherwise, they will just act based on their own ideas, rather than how their role would make the decision, and it will be far less effective.
A downside is that planning and implementing an activity like this does require quite a bit of time. I recommend if you’re interested in trying one out that you use a pre-existing resource to get a sense of how it works before trying to create your own. The effort can be well worth it, as you can reuse the activity semester after semester often with slightly different outcomes based on different decisions that students make, but be prepared for that upfront time investment.

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Role-Playing in Online Courses

Synchronous: breakout room decision/speech→report out
Asynchronous: individual scenarios accompanied by…

Short instructor provided analysis
Message board analysis of different choices

Finally, I’ll address briefly how I’ve used role-playing activities online. I’ll note that my only online experience is during the pandemic, so it’s not a typical online experience.

In synchronous online courses group-based role-playing activities can work well when they are highly structured and just require the students to make a decision together (or prepare a short speech, etc.) where students work in breakout rooms together to prepare and then the speeches are given or decisions announced and analyzed as a full class. I’ve done this successfully in fully online and in hyflex (some students in the classroom and some remote)
In asynchronous courses role-playing activities can also still be used, they just need to be conceived of from the beginning for that format. For instance, I’ve had students work through different individual scenarios (such as being a working class and middle class college student facing various scenarios like doing the wrong reading or oversleeping an missing a quiz), where they analyze the different actions students in those situations might take. Next, they had to analyze the impact of those different actions (i.e., how they contributed to educational inequality). Then, I had pre-recorded mini lecture unpacking some of the decisions students might have made, and helped them make connections to the course material about inequality.
Message boards could also be a useful tool for having students share their different role decisions and compare and contrast the outcomes, though I haven’t personally used them, as I’ve only ever taught some asynchronous days, never an asynchronous course.

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Conclusion

Role-play activities can be fun, active learning strategy
Especially useful for analyzing interplay of structure and agency

I.e., how people’s choices (unintentionally) contribute to inequality

However, they take careful planning to ensure inclusivity and ensure logistical success

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Questions?

Email: agillis@stlawu.edu

Additional Resources:

Labor market activity with broader discussion of role-playing activities in Teaching Sociology
School Choice activity available in TRAILS

As is one about a mock School Board Debate

Slides and open access versions of the above resources available: alannagillisphd.com

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Brief Examples in My Courses

Different stakeholders in a debate about what to do with Confederate Statues on public land
Different gendered parenting styles to planning a 4 year old boy’s birthday party
Different stakeholders in a school board meeting debating policies regarding tracking and course placement
Different parenting styles and financial resources in choosing children’s afterschool activities