Role play exercises

Dividing a class into smaller groups and assigning groupwork tasks often leads to insufficient total preparation, due to lack of time to meet or unbalanced participation by group members. Allocating a discussion board to each working group in a role play assignment and notifying students that their contributions to the discussion will be taken into consideration generally removes these two hurdles. Incompatible timetables between group members is addressed by the asynchronicity of the medium, and everyone must play their part.

Particularly successful role play is practised in the Department of Geography at Durham, where small groups prepare background research and material for a presentation and debate prior to the ‘lecture’. Each group represents a stakeholder in a scenario where a large industrial company wishes to build a new factory on an environmentally sensitive site. The groups – the company, environmental activists, local government and planning officials, local residents – undertake the final debate in front of an invited representative from government or enterprise. The students engage to a high degree, and the large amount of work they do in preparation is clearly visible in the discussion board activity.

Last Modified: 2 August 2010