Serious play in education for social justice - An exploratory study

Abstract

The main aim of the study was to explore the program's overall emotional, cognitive and behavioral impact on the students (n=16) of a small Swiss secondary school class and the general impact on their school as a whole. In addition, the study examined whether the pedagogical elements of serious play and service learning were seen as important or meaningful by key stakeholders. Despite its limitations in scope and generalizability, this explorative evaluation was significant because it was the first external evaluation of the program and because there exists little research on the impact of Swiss ESJ programs as well as on ESJ programs that incorporate serious play elements.The next section of this article describes the local Swiss context in which the program is implemented. Then, the Fair Battles program and the core pedagogical elements of serious play, social empathy and service learning are introduced. The following section describes the methodology and evaluative approach taken in this study. A further section presents results in a descriptive format and a discussion of these results in light of the research literature. A final section offers reflections and recommendations for the Fair Battles program and for ESJ programs in general. BACKGROUND Local Swiss Context and Program DescriptionThrough the introduction of the new national curriculum Lehrplan 21 in Switzerland in 2015, social justice education has come more into the focus of mandatory schooling. The added curricular area, called "education for sustainable development" (Bildung für Nachhaltige Entwicklung, BNE), explicitly introduces various aspects of education for social justice. The new BNE curriculum requirements have led to a considerable increase of social justice education programs. However, as Helbling and Schwarz (2015) point out, there is little control, coordination or evaluation of these new programs.Fair Battles is a school program developed by the private Swiss association Fairp(l)ay. Its goal is to sensitize students about global economic inequalities and about the impact of their personal consumer choices. The word "battle" symbolizes competition or effort on various levels: in the global economy, between school ABSTRACT Fair Battles is a 12-week Swiss education for social justice program with the goal of sensitizing high school students about the impact of their consumer habits on society. The pedagogical concept of Fair Battles is to employ the tool of serious play to enhance students' social empathy, which then leads to service learning projects. This exploratory mixed-methods study examined the impact of the program by using pre-and post-program student surveys (n=16) and post program semi-structured qualitative student interviews (n=10). The survey data were analyzed using SPSS and the interview data were analyzed using template analysis. The results were organized according to Kirkpatrick's four-level evaluation model. The quantitative results show a statistically significant increase in the post-program survey scores for the l...

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