Research: Rime of the Emergent Teachers: Supporting Collaborative Literary Learning through Roleplaying Games

This article explores the affordances of roleplaying games (RPGs) in teacher education contexts for supporting navigation across personal, cultural, and literary interpretive practices. Coding preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) discussions about their own learning experiences, we see how tabletop RPGs designed around existing texts have the potential to support both textual comprehension as well as literary interpretation. RPGs made space for circumventing difficult language and Western cultural knowledge, instead foregrounding students’ identities, textual connections, questions, and meaning-making. PSTs described the benefits of a “double experience” in which their own decisions in the roleplaying game structured their understanding of the original text when they were reading and their interpretations of it after the activity. We share teacher learning around design, including tensions around staying on script to support comprehension or going “off-script” to support critical literary interpretation. We suggest that RPGs in English education contexts can help teachers see the potential of centering joyful, sometimes messy, interpretive meaning-making while decentering individual texts and teacher-centric pedagogies.