Role-playing game as a variant model of educational and methodical interaction with primary sources when teaching the history of Christianity

This work presents methodical recommendations for one of the practical classes from the course “History of Christianity”, which has been taught in the author’s version since the 1990s in the bachelor’s program in philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities of the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”. A working hypothesis about the possibility of using the potential of the role-playing games as a method to find relevant means of assimilating lecture material and primary sources for seminar classes on the course is put forward and tested. The practical process of organizing and conducting a role-playing game on the topic “The first Christians through the eyes of the Romans: ‘war of the worlds’ or an attempt to understand each other?” is presented. The stages of the organization of the game are considered in detail: public offer to potential participants; formulating and proving the goals and objectives of the game; forming teams and establishing communication. Considerable attention is paid to the informational and organizational aspects of the role-playing game: the characteristics of the texts to be studied; distribution of roles in the game and appropriate structuring of teams; conditions of the game: technical, methodological and moral. In the theoretical part, the key moments of the experience of game testing both in the student audience of NaUKMA and among experts ‒ current university researchers and teachers ‒ are specially analyzed. The thematic role-playing game is considered as a special hermeneutic situation; an attempt was made to determine the parameters and criteria for evaluating its cognitive effectiveness. The problems of evaluating the results of the game and the necessary conditions for its application as a methodical model in the existing educational process were especially noted. The relevance of these recommendations is increasing in the conditions of the return to the classroom format after a long period of distance learning and, accordingly, the growing need to intensify the educational and research efforts of the students of NaUKMA.