Exploring the potential of role play in higher education: development of a typology and teacher guidelines

Role-play, in which learners act out roles in case scenarios, appears to be used across a broad range of discipline areas to address learning across the cognitive, psychomotor and affective domains. This paper describes the development of a prospective typology of role-play learning opportunities derived from role-play scenarios used at one large Australian university. The typology included three categories namely ‘Role-Switch’, ‘Acting’ and ‘Almost Real Life’. As an approach to using role-plays ‘Role-Switch’ as a model overtly focuses on helping students to learn from the inside out, i.e. to understand the actions of either people or things through taking on the role of being this other person or object. The ‘Acting’ model of role-play focuses on developing students practical skills through ‘acting out’ a small group scenario (e.g. patient, professional and observer) that requires the practising of a skill. In the ‘Almost Real Life’ category, students are provided with a role-playing experience, i.e. as close to the real experience as is possible. The paper also presents a collaboratively developed set of guidelines for those higher education teachers who may be considering using this active learning approach.