Fostering creativity, empathy and self-regulation through story-based educational role-play

Fostering creativity, empathy and self-regulation through story-based educational role-playThe educational demands of the 21st. century calls for developing learning approaches and designs that are engaging to learners with different strenghts and challenges. In order to raise the percentage of youth who succeed in the educational system, there is a need for developing research based knowledge on how innovative brain-based learning approaches may foster creativity, resilience and self-regulation, to empower the learners to achieve academic excellence.Narrative live-action roleplay is an interactive approach to learning that involves students in collaborative, creative problem solving in meaningful contexts. A R&D project in Danish schools has studied how the curriculum for grades 6-10 can be embedded in immersive narrative roleplay scenarios, and the implications for the learners’ motivation, collaboration and creative problem-solving as well as empathy and self-regulation.The project has used a mixed-methods approach which combined case-studies and surveys.This presentation will present prelimininary findings from the study that indicate the neuro-educational potentials to be achieved, through engaging the learners in narrative educational role-play. These include how the learners engagement in role-play can afford emotionally encoded memory, socially and contextually anchored interactions with the learning material as well as empathy and self-regulation.Based on the findings from the R&D project recommendations have been made on how to integrate subject learning objectives into narrative role-play, that offers embodied interactive learning experiences.The findings have implications for the design of neuro-educational learning scenarios, and can be implemented based on the model that has been developed.