The Future of Education

The society we live in leads us to rethink education and communication languages, especially in educational processes concerning children and adolescents. It seems increasingly difficult to build meaningful educational experiences able to involve young people in transformative processes and overcoming the ingrained "nihilism sense”.
The new digital paradigm and the evolving perceptions of corporeal forms bring some crucial changes we need to explore. The social science teachings need, therefore, to be renewed to better deal with knowledge and skills in an interactive environment, promoting creativity, aesthetics, global and critical thinking, and to enable changes to take place in society.
A possible educational method to tackle these realities can be given by the Educational Live Action Role Play (hereafter "edu-larp"). An edu-larp is a live role-playing game in which the narration is not only told but also played in first hand by the participants with their body and their actions. Players interact with the others by interpreting a character and playing fictitious situations in a real space (“magic circle”).
Despite the edu-larp is still a growth method, several researches (Bowman, 2014) are highlighting specific edu-larp’s benefits, including: identity exploration, communities building and cooperation, transversal skills, didactic media, problem solving, empathy, and self-awareness (Gjedde, 2013; Mochocki, 2013).
The presented study builds on the findings from an experimental research on two migration-themed edu-larp: "Youth On The Run" which simulates for 24 hours the migratory journey of an asylum seeker family from Somalia to Italy; and "300, the battle of the tent cities" which simulates a 4-hour municipal meeting in which the participants have to decide the placement of 300 refugees arriving in their city.
It aims to enquire whether both games have significant effects on the participants’ empathy and ethnic prejudice. The research was conducted on 90 subjects who took part to an edu-larp, through the use of an open-question survey, psychometric scales and Implicit Association Test (IAT). The test was iterated three times: one week before, one week after and three months after the game.
This paper will present the preliminary results of this study, the first reflections on the relationship between “game for social change” (Flanagan, 2006), and possible edu-larp paths in future of education.

Keywords Edu-larp, Empathy, Ethnic Prejudice, Racism, Game Design & Studies;

References: 
[1] Bowman, S. L. (2014). Educational live action role-playing games: A secondary literature review. The Wyrd Companion Book, 112–131.
[2] Flanagan, M. (2006). Making games for social change. AI & SOCIETY, 20(4), 493–505.
[3] Gjedde, L. (2013). Role game playing as a platform for creative and collaborative learning. In European Conference on Games Based Learning. Academic Conferences International Limited.
[4] Mochocki, M. (2013). Edu-larp as revision of subject – matter knowledge. International Journal of Role-Playing, 4, 55-75.