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How might we design healthy, inclusive digital spaces that enable individuals and communities to thrive?


Take Another Perspective: A Character-Playing Simulation

by Jeff Kupperman
Ann Arbor
Executive Director
InGlobal Learning Design
Submission Date
October 14, 2022


CO-CONTRIBUTORS

Jeff Stanzler, Farrah Schiff, Michael Fahy


OVERVIEW

The ability to think critically and view problems from multiple perspectives is essential for work and learning in every society. While teachers are eager to engage students in critical thinking, and students yearn to express their views in a supportive environment, opportunities to do so are rare.

The need for these opportunities spans geography and culture. For example:

  • Ben, a middle school teacher in Tulsa, teaches a current events course, but only a handful of students speak up in class; he is looking for a way to include students who are not comfortable speaking in front of their peers and who may be afraid to express their views.

  • Nance, a Language Arts teacher at a parochial K-8 school in Seattle, is concerned that her students aren’t getting practice engaging with diverse perspectives, because most of the student body is culturally and economically homogeneous.

  • Jordan, a high school history teacher in Detroit, struggled to engage students during Covid remote learning, and wants to be better prepared for future times when a pivot to online school is necessary.

  • Hanan, a secondary school student in Oman, loves to talk about current events with her parents, but in school she never has the opportunity to express her own views.

  • Karen, a parent of an elementary school student with autism, is looking for chances for her son to interact with other kids, around something he is interested in, in a nonjudgmental setting.

  • Kai, a self-described “indie” 8th grader in Pittsburgh who loves to argue with her friends about politics, music, fashion, and religion, is bored in school because, in her words, “we’re not allowed to talk about anything real.”

  • Zayan, a high school sophomore whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Sri Lanka, is struggling to connect with classmates after his family moved from a diverse city neighborhood to an affluent suburb; he is uncomfortable speaking up in class, though he often has much to say.

Take Another Perspective (TAP) is a flexible online character-playing tool that can be used to address the needs of the personas above. Adaptable to a wide range of subjects and learning contexts, TAP provides a safe and inventive space for participants to have conversations across differences. By responding to thought-provoking scenarios in the voices of diverse characters, learners practice skills that are essential in order to communicate better with people of different backgrounds, solve problems in diverse teams, and create more inclusive group cultures. TAP employs a simple but robust format that allows learners to participate independently, and that can be used entirely online or as part of in-person activities.

An important distinction between TAP and other scenario-based tools is that it uses character-playing rather than role-playing. Whereas role-playing asks the participant to do “what you would do if you were in that role,” character-play asks the participant to see the world through the eyes of a particular person – a person with their own individual goals, background, and cultural context – and to respond (as best they can) as that individual would. Character-playing, therefore, requires participants to not just put themselves in a novel situation, but to consider the social, cultural, historical, and personal contexts that would lead to a particular perspective.

Educators using TAP choose a problem-based scenario and a set of characters, and then assign characters to their students. Students then discuss the scenario online in the voices of their characters, and vote on a resolution to the problem. Getting started with TAP is easy: educators register themselves on the TAP website and select a scenario to be the focus of discussion, choosing from a library of scenarios or creating their own. They can then select characters for their students to use, drawn from a list of real-life figures representing a range of cultures and historical periods, plus selected characters from literature. Each character comes with a profile, written in first-person, so a learner can quickly begin taking their character’s perspective, and quickly form a view about the scenario from that perspective, even if the learner doesn’t have a well-developed opinion of their own. Natural-language search functionality allows educators to efficiently find scenarios and characters that match their instructional goals. In this way, TAP can be used by individual educators quickly and easily, for durations as short as a single class period.

TAP is an evolution of Place Out Of Time, a program designed by Interactive Communications & Simulations at the University of Michigan, that has been used by students and teachers globally for over 20 years. Evidence of the effectiveness of Place Out Of Time has been documented in several journal articles, and perhaps most importantly through the testimony of teachers who use the program year after year. For example: “[Place Out Of Time enables] students to connect classroom subject matter to real world situations, past and present, and to use that knowledge in new and different applications… I cannot stress enough the effectiveness of Place Out Of Time in helping me teach, and my students learn self-expression and respect for differences across place and time” (Sherry Mockles, 21st Century Learning Pathways Coordinator, Flint [Michigan] Community Schools).

TAP builds on Place Out Of Time, with its leveraging of student ingenuity, playfulness, and creative writing, and removes barriers to entry by streamlining the design. While dozens of teachers and thousands of students have used Place Out Of Time, many more would like to use the tool but find that the time and semester-long commitment required makes participation not feasible. In addition, Place Out Of Time is not easily scalable because it requires high-touch moderation by a university team. In Place Out Of Time, students take on the persona of a historical or contemporary character and engage with a “trial” (court) scenario over an 8-week period. The scenarios are based on real-world topics ranging from free speech and religion to human rights and immigration. University students, who also take on characters, act as mentors and discussion facilitators. The current structure is thus high-touch and requires an extensive time commitment.

In contrast, TAP can be used by individual teachers quickly and easily, for durations as short as a single class period. TAP offers a set of simple but provocative scenarios that allow participants to engage quickly in substantive interactions. For example, imagine a scenario that is based on a real case in Italy where an immigrant man with no housing or job stole a sandwich from a grocery, and was determined by Italy’s supreme court to be not guilty because he only took what he needed to survive. Was this ruling fair both to the man and to the owner of the grocery? Was it in the interest of the community and the country? Did it matter that the man was an immigrant? In TAP, students take on a diverse array of characters ranging from Cleopatra and Karl Marx to Steve Jobs and Rosa Parks, and using those characters’ voices and perspectives, debate these questions and more from legal, ethical, political, economic, and cultural angles. 

TAP can be used with almost any subject, as an entirely on-line exercise or as a lead-in or follow-up to in-class discussion, so it is well-suited for online learning, mixed online/in-person learning, or schools that need to switch rapidly between in-person and online instruction for public health or other reasons. A teacher’s guide will provide suggestions for facilitating and enhancing learning both online and offline in the classroom.

Because TAP is low-touch and can be used for time frames as short as one class period, we envision at least 50,000 students using the system within the first year. Since supervision and moderation are done by teachers, program management costs will be kept to a minimum. InGlobal Learning Design will continue to manage and maintain TAP in collaboration with Interactive Communications & Simulations at the University of Michigan. To cover TAP’s modest ongoing management and maintenance costs, we will seek corporate and institutional sponsorships, and may consider asking users for optional and nominal donations.

We will measure success using the following metrics:

1. Total number of TAP users.

2. The number of repeat teacher-users (teachers and facilitators who use TAP more than once, indicating that they find it useful).

3. Results of satisfaction surveys (given to all users).

4. Results of a perspective-taking assessment, based on existing measures like the Historical Perspective Taking assessment and the Assessment of Social Perspective-taking Performance. Because of the effort needed to collect, clean, and code data, this measure will be administered to a subset of users. We will consult with a psychometrician to ensure validity of the measure and data collected. 


PURPOSE

The following goals are central to TAP:

FOSTERING EMPATHY AND PERSPECTIVE-TAKING ACROSS CULTURES

The core of TAP is the practice of perspective-taking. In real life, perspective-taking can be hard because another person’s perspective might threaten one’s own identity or views, and expressing one’s perspective can carry the risk that others may reject that perspective or one’s whole identity. TAP mitigates these risks by putting distance between one’s own identity and one's character, using the magic of play to create a space that is engaging and intense, but at the same time safe from the threats of the real world. The voices in TAP come to life through the imaginations of the participants, but because they are based on real people, TAP allows for real understanding of other perspectives through dialog and reflection.

CREATING SAFE AND HEALTHY SPACES FOR IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT

While TAP allows for perspective-taking in a safe space because one’s expression is protected character-play, we have evidence from the Place Out Of Time project that character-play can at the same time be a powerful tool for exploring one’s own views and voice. (See the “Stories from Place Out Of Time” attachment for specific examples.) Our evidence shows that the chance to try out different views, be challenged by others, and encounter a wide range of perspectives, all in a safe, low-stakes environment, can be a unique and impactful experience that can help individuals formulate their own views and understand their own identity in relation to others.

IMPROVING EQUITABLE ACCESS TO RICH LEARNING EXPERIENCES

While games and simulations can been effective tools for learning, equitable access can be a challenge if the games are costly, if they require access to technology that is scarce or unavailable at some schools, if they privilege students who already have extensive access to digital technologies, or if they demand an amount of time and energy that many teachers do not have. TAP supports equitable learning because it is:

FLEXIBLE: TAP can be done entirely online, hybrid, or in person.
ACCESSIBLE: Technology requirements are minimal and ordinary.
LOW-COST: Costs to K-12 teachers to use TAP will be nominal at most.
TEACHER-FRIENDLY: Teachers do not need extensive preparation to use TAP.
INCLUSIVE: TAP allows voices and perspectives that are often underrepresented or excluded to make connections across identities that are protected by the safety of character-playing.
VALIDATING: TAP allows students to display ingenuity, savvy and interpersonal skills that often aren’t prized in school.

QUESTIONS

Ann Arbor, Michigan

United States

When Harry (S. Truman) Met Sally (Ride): Students Gain New Perspectives Through Character Play

There is no evidence that Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, ever met Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space. But in a recent session using the online tool Take Another Perspective (TAP), Harry (the president) and Sally (the astronaut) talked freely about gender identity, divisive politics, and why there still has not been a woman president of the United States. In reality, Harry was played by Annie, a secondary school student at St. Peter’s School in Manchester, UK, and Sally was played by James, a student at Kenwood Academy High School in Chicago. Other characters in the session included Winnie Mandela, James Baldwin, former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto, Joan of Arc, and Confucius. To date, over 100,000 students in 39 countries have used TAP to explore other cultures and periods of history, and to take on contentious topics from every angle in a safe space.

“It was a real challenge playing Truman,” said Annie. “I had to learn really quickly about the American political system and what life was like in the United States in the 1950s. I’m not sure how well I did, but people seemed to listen to me, and I was able to talk about topics I never would have been brave enough to discuss in regular class, or even with my friends.”

James initially had misgivings about playing Sally Ride. “When my teacher told me I had to play a woman, I was like, aw man, this is going to be embarrassing. But it turns out she’s a badass. I have lots of respect for Sally.”

Neither James nor Annie have seen the 1989 movie When Harry Met Sally, but in TAP, they are making their own story.

The primary target audience for TAP is middle school and high school classrooms in the U.S., in any subject that covers topics that can be discussed from different perspectives.

TAP is, however, adaptable to a wide range of participants and topics, and so secondary audiences include university instructors, parents who home-school their children, companies who need their employees to better understand diverse perspectives of their clients or colleagues, and designers who want to prototype ideas with a variety of user personas in a low-cost, dynamic way.

Place Out Of Time, the ancestor project to TAP, is currently used in schools across the U.S. and several countries overseas.

K-12 Teachers and other educators need a way to quickly and easily set up safe spaces for students to have engaging discourse around important topics, because learning to have productive dialogue across multiple perspectives is more important than ever, but current demands on teachers leave them with little time or support to create these spaces.

Students need a way to try out different perspectives and practice constructive dialogue across differences in a playful, low-stakes environment, because classrooms can be risky places to express one’s own views, and most classrooms are not places where a true diversity of perspectives exist and are valued.

While K-12 is our primary audience, TAP can also be a useful tool for adult teams who need to work through a contentious issue in a low-stakes environment. It is also useful for designers who need a way to quickly test prototypes in a simulated environment, because prototype testing with users in a realistic situation is not always feasible, especially if the solution is not a physical object or piece of software but a system, strategy, or process.

We would use prize money in the following three ways:

1. To invest in technical development of the TAP software.

2. To cover costs of recruitment and user support for piloting TAP across a variety of use cases.

3. To pay for consultation from a psychometrician as we develop a measure of perspective-taking ability that will allow us to evaluate the effect of TAP on users' perspective-taking skill. 

Development Plan:

STAGE 1: Refine Place Out Of Time web application into TAP prototype (200 person-hours)
Using the Place Out Of Time technology and content as a base, the team will create a prototype website for TAP. Because the TAP team is the same team that developed Place Out Of Time, prototype development can happen quickly and efficiently.

STAGE 2: Test and pilot TAP across use cases (150 person-hours)

STAGE 3: Learning Assessment development and implementation (80 person-hours)
Once we have a stable application that incorporates feedback from testing and piloting, we plan to develop a measure that can be used as a pretest/posttest in order to help educators and scholars understand the impact of TAP on perspective-taking skills, which will in turn inform the refinement of TAP and the development of other digital spaces that cultivate healthy, empathic, and resilient human beings.

Our biggest long-term need is to find a partner or partners that can help provide funding and revenue streams so that TAP can scale and sustain itself over time. We are a small team with a long, successful track record, but we have operated largely under-the-radar. Our strength is in developing meaningful and engaging learning experiences; bringing those experiences to a wider audience is one of our biggest challenges.

We also need access to support for creating scalable, quantitative outcome measures. So far, research on the effectiveness of TAP’s ancestor, Place Out Of Time, has been almost exclusively qualitative, but schools and organizations will need more scalable, easily implemented measures to gauge the effectiveness of TAP in their own contexts.

Finally, we need resources to grow the TAP library of scenarios and character profiles, so that educators can have a wide range of choices to meet their curricular needs and learning goals.


Additional Images


  October 14, 2022

  1260 VIEWS

  4 LIKES

  8 Followers

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Challenge Journey

Proposal Submission
Completed
2. Review
Completed
Proposal Refinement
Completed
4. Final Review
Completed
Top Proposals
Dec 6, 2022
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Comments
7
Medha Tare

Thanks for sharing this very interesting proposal!  Can you share how this experience would lead to greater well-being or thriving in other digital or non-digital spaces? In an ideal world, what could you measure to show that long-term impact?

Katrin Robertson

This sounds like an awesome tool!  Being able to look at the world from a perspective other than one's own is difficult for most people, and being able to embody a character (vs. merely role play) is a powerful form of engagement that help people get past discomfort.   How you are drawing on something natural in human play, which is exercising imagination and creativity in our interactions with others, really resonates with me.  I look forward to using this tool someday in my classroom! 

Sofia L.

@Jeff Kupperman As we get close to the end of the submission phase, we wanted to share a few additional resources available to support in the process. We have an incredible group of Community Mentors who are offering 1 on 1 sessions, learn more here. And we’ll also have a Storytelling Supertips event on October 26 at 2 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada) – you can register here.

Jeff Kupperman

Thank you @Sofia Lopez! I talked with Célia yesterday and she may have mentioned this to you, but the images we posted under "additional images" only show up as thumbnails, and there doesn't seem to be a way to display the larger images. Any advice?

Jeff Stanzler

@Michelle   

That's a great question, Michelle. Our experience with this kind of character play is that it serves as a lever to surface creativity and ingenuity, especially from young people. Avenues for young people to explore and express their ingenuity in school are often quite limited. In our TAP design, we strive to take the inventiveness that young people habitually demonstrate on the playground, for example, and to bring it into the classroom in a way that makes them aware of their own capacity to think creatively and to show true originality, unburdened (as adults so often are) by received wisdom or by social norms. In our minds, this work is consonant with design thinking, where we endeavor to create contexts and craft invitations for people to see more and see differently, and to thus be able to imagine new approaches to problems.    

Michelle Lee

Really appreciate how TAP encourages informed dialogue and seeing things from others' perspectives. It's a critical skill that seems more important than ever – a way for students to understand from an early age that people are complex and make decisions based on a number of different factors and life experiences that have helped shape who they are. I especially love how playful this experience is, enabling students to feel the emotions involved with making complex choices. I'm really interested to see how this plays out, especially with characters coming from different cultures and periods of time. What can we all learn from watching students explain their points of view through thoughtful dialogue?