Using role play to explore professional situations for practice-based courses
Using role play to explore professional situations for practice-based courses
Sue Pinnick
What is the idea?
This chapter explores how practice-based courses in a professional environment, such as teaching, social work or medicine, can use role play to help students explore ideas of professionalism in different scenarios to prepare them for work-based settings.
Students will work collaboratively in groups, using exploratory dialogic talk in order to reach a consensus on a scenario that they will create from a range of situations. They will then produce two role plays where they reenact the scenario: the first representing unprofessional behaviour; the second representing professional behaviour. The rest of the groups will have the opportunity to reflect on and ask questions of the scenario. All groups will reflect on the strengths and challenges of the activity itself.
Why this idea?
Evans (2008) suggests that there are two types of teacher professionalism: the professionalism ‘prescribed’ by policies and national standards and the ‘enacted’ professionalism existing in teachers’ practices, predominantly at a school level. Both school mentors and trainee teachers on initial teacher education (ITE) programmes have recognised that learning to be ‘professional’ can be a challenge for some trainee teachers (Pinnick, 2020). However, not only do trainee teachers need to provide evidence of ‘prescribed’ professionalism in order to meet the teacher standards (DfE, 2012), but, perhaps more importantly, they need to enact professionalism on a daily basis, in order to form relationships with both staff and students and adapt to the school community or ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1990). In preparation for their induction into trainees’ initial teaching placement, it is important to cover some of the challenges they may face in the first few weeks.
While, of course, it is always possible to explore professional dilemmas theoretically, since Dewey (1938), educators have identified the fundamental role of experiential, embodied learning in learning. In their U.S based meta-analysis of the effects of drama-based pedagogy on outcomes across the curriculum, Lee et al. (2015) highlighted the impact of drama as an embodied approach to learning. More recently, pioneering neuroscientific research suggests that when our bodies interact through drama, not only do we transport new experiences to the brain, but we deeply encode the information and transform it into knowledge (Damasio, 2021; Gallese & Wojciehowski, 2011; Immordino-Yang & Gotlieb, 2017). Moreover, this activity includes the opportunity for students to use exploratory dialogic talk in order to reach a consensus. Interaction through talk ‘vitally mediates the cognitive and cultural spaces between …learner[s] ‘of any age…and what he or she has yet to know and understand’ (Alexander, 2020, p. 15).
How could others implement this idea?
Put students into groups of approximately four, with a mix of gender, age and backgrou