The following ROCKET units include training and workshop materials for students, teachers and administrative staff. They are available as Open Educational Resources under a CC BY NC license, so that they may be re-used, adapted, and shared by colleagues interested in applying Role-playing Games, Virtual Exchange training resources, and workshop materials in their own settings.
Some units are also downloadable in a non-graphical accessible version.
Lecturer Guideline
The Lecturer Guideline was developed by the ROCKET team to help foster diversity, equity and inclusion during in-person and online teaching, including critical virtual exchange contexts. In many cases, virtual teaching formats can recreate analog imbalances and reinforce existing barriers, or even create new challenges. Therefore, ROCKET consciously addresses these issues via a checklist and offers a few select examples of further resources from its participating universities (Göttingen in Germany, Groningen in the Netherlands, and Uppsala in Sweden).
If you come from a different institution or country, you may want to check if similar guidance is available to you in a language you speak. In case you would like to get an overview of institutional offers in general, we recommend our resource on Whole-Institution maps. The following checklist is organized in a chronological order and is meant to aid university lecturers and teachers in making their classes more equitable and inclusive during every stage of the course. These stages include personal reflection, course conception, the teaching period, assessment, and counseling as well as opportunities for feedback.
Whole Institution Maps
The Whole Institution Map (WIM) is a tool which allows you to create an overview of supporting structures at your institution. Such an overview can benefit a diverse student and employee population, increase inclusion, and foster equal opportunities. Often, supporting structures for persons with different needs are in place, but not well-known or easy to find. Therefore, we here provide some practical tips and inspiration.
Role-playing-Games Facilitation and Safety
This unit is about how to facilitate a transformative role-playing game, including materials on facilitation and safety design as well as a demo video of the ROCKET team role-playing with these facilitation techniques.
The goal of the scenarios is to approach the positions, interests, feelings, and core basic needs involved in conflicts, including issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The short scenarios feature common situations in higher education institutions involving students, teachers, and administrative staff. Embedded in the scenarios are issues related to power, belonging, freedom, fun, and safety/security.
ROCKET teaches theory and practice on addressing conflicts in everyday life through an engaging method: role-playing games. Such components make up the building blocks of successful conflict transformation in the future, empowering participants with skills to help address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in their lives, whether in higher education or beyond.
Role-playing Scenarios
The documents describe the role-playing game workshops and offer 19-25 scenarios developed for students and admin staff in Higher Education by the ROCKET team in collaboration with the ROCKET Advisory Bard. The scenarios focus on short, easy to play role-playing games with minimal details so that players can easily engage without feeling cognitively overwhelmed. They address common, everyday conflicts that occur in higher education settings. The characters are usually students, faculty members, and/or administrative staff.
In terms of conflict related to DEI, we have decided upon a careful approach. Because of our emphasis on intercultural communication, some scenarios integrate common conflicts that arise as a result of language, cultural, belief systems, or religious differences. In some cases, characters will have caring responsibilities and other pressures related to diverse backgrounds.
The scenarios are basic: no more than 2-3 lines. They feature 3 characters and the scenes are intended to be tightly facilitated: one facilitator for every 3 characters.
The appendices of this document contain the slides of workshops covering the ROCKET themes in which these role-playing scenarios can be included.
Student-centered Role-playing Scenarios
Admin Staff-centered Role-playing Scenarios
CVE Handbook – Moving towards a more equitable and inclusive implementation of Virtual Exchange
This handbook offers an Open Educational Resource which illustrates guidelines on the more equitable and inclusive implementation of Virtual Exchange – Critical Virtual Exchange. It shares the expertise which was accumulated throughout the project and links to further training materials for students, lecturers, and administrative staff, which can also be accessed as OER. This handbook has been written for anyone who holds an interest in playfully taking on a new perspective, in innovating in-person or digital teaching formats, or in better dealing with diversity and conflict in their daily lives.
CVE Collaboration Work Sheet
As part of the Erasmus+ ROCKET Teacher training course, we designed a collaboration work sheet, which aims to offer a foundation for reflection and joint considerations when envisioning a CVE project with a teaching partner. The work sheet entails a brief questionnaire where interested lecturers who are thinking about working together in a CVE format can find out about each other´s expectations in a future collaboration via CVE. Furthermore, it supports lecturers in identifying learning outcomes, activities or forms of assessment for their joint project and addresses how taking a critical perspective can impact the planning and implementation of their CVE project.
This work is licensed under CC BY NC. More information here.