Enacting Professional Practice: Role-play and playing roles

This short paper presents a design experiment, where students in the Bachelor´s Degree Programme at Dan-ish Social Education (Pædagoguddannelsen) enacted scenarios composed from shared individual experiences in practice. Afterwards, students emphasized how acting out characters had provided them with new perspec-tives on their experience as well as future practice as professional pedagogues (pædagoger) in day care. Though the content was challenging, concerning problematic relations with children’s parents in day care, students’ written reflections reveal that they felt it was a “joyful” and “playful” learning experience.
The design experiment is part of a practice-based research, exploring a dramaturgical approach to didactics through experiments, framed by a design research program. The terms role-play and playing roles are stu-dents’ expressions, and are of common use in an educational context. Drawing on concepts from a dramatur-gical knowledge base, this research offers more nuanced language on the term role-play, suggesting the con-cept “an act of acting” as a redoubling of identities. This is concretized through examples of how to frame and encourage processes of identification and distance regarding a fictive character. It also reveals how this leads to a reflective exploration of practice in the classroom. The research is a work in progress, and one of the preliminary experiments in the PhD “The Play” in Playful learning.