Using Gamification in the Classroom: “Emerging: The Educational Journey of Immigrant Students"

Overview: In this session, we will briefly discuss the innovative, interdisciplinary, and evidence-based creation of a based board game and then play the game! Participants will engage in conversation around human rights violations of immigrants in schools, collaboration in advocacy, and discuss how the game is used in social work classes.Proposal text: This session will be facilitated by the PI and a student research assistant on a two-year innovative and interdisciplinary project to create a board game for use in the classroom and in-service trainings of school social workers in the field. We will discuss how the project used a team based learning approach (Hanley, 2021; Parmelee et al., 2012) to research with a group of mixed BSW and graduate TESOL education students; and resulted in students as co-authors on peer reviewed publications (Evans et al., in prep; Lee et al., in prep). These studies served as the “game content” for the board game. We will also discuss how we created an elective course that uses gamification in the classroom (Sebastian & François, 2019); teaches advocacy (Chang-Muy & Congress, 2015; Dalrymple et al., 2013; Oyen et al., 2020), and goes beyond a simple role-play to include role reversals and sequencing (Ferrari et al., 2020). Our aim in sharing these varied experiences is that we can reach a broad audience and share ways that more social work faculty can be innovative and interdisciplinary in our teaching.
In this session we will play the board game which illuminates the abundant humans rights violations immigrant and undocumented students face when it comes to equality and equity in the US school system (Booi et al., 2016; Jaffe-Walter, et al., 2019; McCorkle & Bailey, 2016; Shillingford et al., 2018). Through game play and conversation, the participants will experience and achieve the following learning objectives: understanding the critical role that collaboration plays in success, understanding the varied experiences of different types of immigrants, understanding the support systems available to immigrant students, and identifying a variety of support systems available to immigrant students (and teachers/families) in local schools and communities.
After the game, the conference participants will engage in a dialogue similar to that of students in the classroom, or school social workers to help understand the nuances of what happened during play. Participants will leave with enhanced knowledge of immigrant student experiences, how we can advocate for change, and (hopefully) increased empathy. We will end the session with a discussion of the ways that the various aspects of this project (team-based learning, students as research assistants, gamification, and role-play) can be used in social work classes.