The Worldbuilding Workshop: Teaching Critical Thinking and Empathy Through World Modeling, Simulation, and Play

The Worldbuilding Workshop: Teaching Critical Thinking and Empathy Through World Modeling, Simulation, and Play

A research-based instructional approach that cultivates critical thinking, empathy, and inquiry through collaborative environmental and societal modeling. In The Worldbuilding Workshop, Trent Hergenrader and Stephen Slota explore collaborative worldbuilding as an educational tool for deconstructing and analyzing the planet’s most urgent, relevant, and mind-boggling questions. Their process unfolds across six stages configured to promote learner reflection on governmental, economic, social, and cultural forces. They look at how different people experience these forces under different socioeconomic and sociocultural conditions and what each of us can do to effectuate change in our shared reality. The book details the relationship between worldbuilding and contemporary learning theories; methods by which instructors and learners can co-develop accurate representations of various worlds; and how simulation and role-play activities can be applied to support learner discovery and creativity. ENDORSEMENTS “ The Worldbuilding Workshop shows how to center imagination—our mind’s world-building, time-traveling power—at the heart of education in a world that urgently needs it.” —James Paul Gee, Regents Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University; author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy “A genuinely new, practical, and much-needed pedagogy for playful and connected learning. Where everything zigs to numbers and algorithms, The Worldbuilding Workshop zags to role-play and narrative to nurture humanistic inquiry of our complex worlds.” —Sebastian Deterding, Chair of Design Engineering, Imperial College London; coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Role-Playing Game Studies Trent Hergenrader is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Worldbuilding and Storytelling at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. He is best known for Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers . Stephen Slota is a leading educational technologist, learning theorist, and interactive storyteller. They have directed numerous digital education and instructional design projects on behalf of CVS Health, Arizona State University, the University of Connecticut, Intel Corporation, and Pfizer.