Crafting speculative roleplaying games for teacher education: Questioning power and centering empathy in schools

Our collective of teacher educators and researchers share the contours of a collaboration on a critical arts-based research project. We attend to the ways we collaboratively composed a table-top roleplaying game, a text intended to support players in co-creating their own speculative fiction. Our game, We Know Something You Don’t Know, was designed in the Belonging Outside Belonging system (Alder, Citation2018) to support collaborative speculative storytelling in learning settings. Specifically, we aimed to support preservice and in-service teachers’ reflection on how the power structures of schooling frame some children as troublemakers (Shalaby, Citation2017), and to engage with Shalaby’s call to consider what those troublemakers might teach us about dysfunctional structures of schooling. Our findings suggest that our collaborative composing was shaped by immediations (Ehret et al., Citation2019)– moments of yes which led to decisions around what should be fixed or stay open for players, recursively sparking further immediations.