Serious Play: Co-Designing Access to Social Justice Education

Abstract

Serious play, the act of play pursued purposefully to achieve an identified objective, shows promise as a method for eliciting dilemmas faced by teachers in connection to social justice education. A process of participatory co-design in classrooms with high school teachers across Metro Detroit and in Alameda County, California, guided the development of a serious play toolkit, a set of loose parts which stimulate playful behaviors in teachers to communicate dilemmas, moral crossroads requiring the making of decisions, and pre-script responses to enable student access to social justice curricula. The parallel 'safe space' afforded by play allowed teachers to explore their attitudes and biases connected to social justice without real-world consequences, while the 'brave space' of a co-design workshop built on principles of asset-based design approaches and effective professional learning for teachers encouraged reflection on individual practice and modeling alternative actions to empower learning on race and privilege. Although the 2020 public health emergency prematurely halted research to further demonstrate the efficacy of the serious play toolkit, early prototypes saw teachers express dilemmas around race, identity and political affiliation. Follow-up interviews with participants suggest that serious play made teachers' behaviors during social justice instruction tangible, both in form and in feeling. Incorporating play into the design of interventions to address wicked problems is relevant to designers and educators seeking to expand access to social justice education, as well as to the broader problem space of instilling equity in public education in the United States.