Table Of ContentSO YOU WANT TO USE
ROLE PLAY?
a new approach in how to plan
SO YOU WANT TO USE
ROLE PLAY?
a new approach in how to plan
Gavin Bolton and
Dorothy Heathcote
Trentham Books
First published in 1999 by Trentham Books Limited
Trentham Books Limited
Westview House
734 London Road
Oakhill
Stoke on Trent
Staffordshire
England ST4 5NP
© Gavin Bolton and Dorothy Heathcote 1999
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British Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library
ISBN 978 1 85856 719 8
Contents
Introduction • vii
Chapter One
Examples of a range of genres– school age • 1
Chapter Two
Role work for training adults • 23
Chapter Three
The dimensions of role-play • 57
Chapter Four
Sign in Role-play • 89
Chapter Five
Who are you teaching? • 113
Chapter Six
How do we tackle racism – with infants? • 129
Chapter Seven
The Police and Stereotyping • 145
Chapter Eight
Practical Issues,Leader taking a role and
Learning outcomes • 167
Index • 187
v
Introduction
This book has two kinds of readers in mind. Those of you who
would like to try using role-play with your group, but don’t
know where or how to start. Those of you who, having tried
it, now want to extend its scope and are ready to rethink its
principles. Whether you are working in the caring professions,
commerce, industry or education we hope these pages will offer you
new ideas and a new way of looking at what it means to learn
something through role work.
The book is full of examples of practice, but because we do not have
a particular kind of group or learning context in mind, you should
take our examples as representing a kind of role-play. We are not
saying ‘You should do this particular exercise’, but rather, ‘Thiskind
of role-play may be suitable for what you are doing’, leaving you to
choose the subject-matter. So our chosen themes or topics are
arbitrary. For instance, the first chapter offers a wide range of
examples on Road Safety with young children. We are not setting
out to appeal to teachers who happen to want to cover the subject of
Road Safety with young children; we are using it to illustrate
underlying principles of role-play that we hope are transferable to
any topic you and your group are exploring.
Similarly we see our range of exercises relating to the theme of
‘disloyalty’with adolescents, the training of apprentice gas-fitters in
how to approach customers, the testing of managers in team respon-
sibility and the medical students’initiation into visualising the daily
responsibilities of the doctor they may one day become, as illus-
trative of principles applicable to a myriad of contexts.
But this book attempts to do more than outline the rules of role-play.
Its authors have a mission! We a re attempting to break what we see
as the ‘moulds’ of role-play practice. Publications on the subject
vii
viii• SOYOUWANTTOUSEROLE-PLAY?
seem to follow one (or both) of two traditions. There is the
‘simulation’ tradition in which a ‘real-life’ work problem is
replicated and the participants engage in solving it. Derived from
this are a number of exercises set up to isolate for subsequent
examination a particular deficiency in interpersonal communica-
tion. The learning outcome is to do with procedures and the
effectiveness of individuals to follow them. The second tradition has
a ‘counselling’ basis. In these the emphasis is on sensitivity in
groups and the honest facing up to one’s behaviour in stressful work
situations. You will find that most recommended role-play practice
derives from one or other of these traditions. Much of it is based on
sound principles and planning. And yet anecdotal recollections of
past role-play experiences often dismiss the work as a waste of time
and/or a dreaded embarrassment.
In this text we have avoided the ‘counselling’ aspect of role-play
altogether. We acknowledge its potential in certain circumstances –
indeed some of our own past experience has been involved in
therapy – but we want to give a firm educational basis to the
approach recommended here. Our objective will always be ‘what do
we want them to learn?’ Our methodology will combine con-
ventional teaching resources and dramatic forms of presentation.
The term ‘role-play’inadequately conveys what it is we are about. In
our view such a term misleadingly stresses the behaviour required of
the participants. What we are concerned to stress is the making of
meanings for contemplation. Let us try to explain...
Imagine a huge, dazzling white square of paper with a tiny pitch-
black cross in one of its corners. Our attention would be arrested by
it and we might feel impelled to ‘explain it’to ourselves. It cannot
be said that its meaning (or meanings) is located in a particular
place. You can point with your finger to the white paper and to the
black cross but you cannot point to the impact of the two together,
out of which the ‘meaning’ emerges at the moment of your con-
templation, and is indeed dependent on your contemplation.
We hope that this analogy takes us nearer to our purpose in using
role-play or role workas we often prefer to call it. It is not what our
finger can successfully point to that we are interested in opening up.
INTRODUCTION • ix
It is the emergent meaning that requires our attention. We want to
take the focus offrole-play as form of behaviour of interest in itself
(to be ‘pointed at’), and steer it towards a meaning-making act of
contemplation. The meaning will not lie either in the role-player nor
in the ‘character’ being played, but rather in whatever the whole
context is – of which that role-player and ‘character’are but part.
Thus the essence of this revised version of role-play coincides with
the essence of theatre. Both are about ‘seeing something as signi-
ficant’. Just as in our analogy of a cross on paper, the object only has
meaning if someone wants to give it significance, so all theatre is
fundamentally about finding significance. If the curtain goes up in
the theatre on an empty stage except for a toppled chair, the
audience immediately begin to ‘read’it as a toppled chair isolated in
an empty space – and they will not be able to resist giving some
meaning to it. Even an empty stage is filled with ‘present absence’
– and the audience ‘hold their breathe’!
Now the role-play exercises in this book may on the surface appear
to have little connection with a public theatre – indeed we are not
interested, for instance, in getting people toact– but they arerooted
in this one artistic characteristic of ‘seeing something as signifi-
cant’. This is essentially the dramatic methodology serving an
educationalpurpose.
Thus when we write of broadening the use of role-play, we are
attempting to change its basic focus away from a behavioural
emphasis to the signing of meaning, but, further, we recommend the
leader of a group always be aware of those important, alternative,
non-role-playing, educational avenues, so that the dramatic
presentation may flexibly operate as critical to, complementary to or
even supplementary to other learning experiences.
The broadening of the methodology allows us to embrace two con-
trasted conceptions of the groups we work with. Traditionally, there
is a group of people from whomindividuals will be selected as role-
players and each of these players will be required to adopt a
‘character’, ready to interact with the other ‘characters’and be criti-
cally observed by the rest of the group. We have argued above that
even within this traditional usage of role-play, our aim is to focus
x• SOYOUWANTTOUSEROLE-PLAY?
attention away from either the player or the ‘character’being played
to the meaning emerging from the whole context. But we will also
from time to time change this conventional way of doing it by
putting the wholeclass in role. In doing it this way, not only have we
ensured that the class will now be audience to themselves, we have
changed the basic conception of ‘role’. Whereas in what we have
called the traditional approach, role is seen as the representation of
an individual character or type, in this approach we have further
removed the significance of the individual in order to embrace the
notion of a [fictional]group of people. They are to be artisans, em-
ployers, librarians, scientists, artists, children, parents, pedestrians,
and so on, ad infinitum, in fact any group of people that could
legitimately exist as a group in the ‘real world’. Using this method,
whatever happens in the fiction is going to happen to a social
grouping whose only claim to an identity is that they are a group and
can identify themselves as a group. They learn about what role-
behaviours are required of them as a group; they adopt that role, as
a group; they respond to whatever happens, as a group; they make
things happen, as a group.
Our claim is that this group entry into the fiction can enhance the
learning potential of the material. Effectively, in using this method
you are endowing your class with a role that increases their power or
ability to engage with the material being learnt or studied. From
being your students, trainees, or pupils, by adopting their collective
role they arerepositioning themselves for engaging more effectively
with the subject matter. The chances of enhanced learning are often
increased too when you take a role yourself of someone who meets
the fictional ‘group’. That you are ‘inside’the fiction [‘teacher-in-
role’it is commonly called] allows you a degree of subtlety in expos-
ing nuances of information, a subtlety that would not normally be
available to you.
The introduction of this innovatory practice into role-play opens up
a wide range of exercises that could not normally find a place in a
book on role-play. Of course the techniques for handling them are
equally innovative, drawing on a set of principles only marginally
linked with regular role-play practice. Throughout the following
chapters attention will be drawn especially to those steps that need
