Background: Mission US is a series of interactive first-person role-playing history games and curricular materials that address a critical problem: students lack fundamental knowledge of our nation's history. According to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, 2018), only 13% of Grade 8 students were proficient on the…

The purpose of this article is to determine the effectiveness of role-playing games (RPGs) as an intervention program to reduce bullying. Eighty-six French 6th-graders were randomly assigned to either the empathy training program involving three RPG sessions of 60 minutes or to the control condition in which students benefited from three sessions…

Imagining what it was like to live in the past may help secondary school students to understand historical developments and situations. In this case study, the opportunities of a drama task are explored by using a mixed-method approach. In small groups, Dutch 14-15-year-old students examined historical sources and produced a short film clip on…

Bullying is a serious social problem at schools, very prevalent independently of culture and country, and particularly acute for teenagers. With the irruption of always-on communications technology, the problem, now termed cyberbullying, is no longer restricted to school premises and hours. There are many different approaches to address…

This paper aims to provide an overview of evidence of schools' engagement in Fairtrade in the UK through the Fairtrade Foundation's Fairtrade School Awards programme. The paper provides a summary of the comments from schools' engagement with the programme based on data from teachers and pupils' learning with evidence from the different levels of…

What is a sense of period? And how can pupils' sense of period be developed? Questions such as these have troubled history teachers for many years, often revolving around debates over the role played by empathy and imagination in coming to know a period on its own terms. Rather than adopt a comparative approach, Dan Smiths decided in his teaching…

This article examines students' participation in Boalian Theater activities to role-play, rehearse, and develop strategies to use when bullied or witnessing bullying. One intention of the theater was for students to respond and to engage in perspective-taking and empathy as one of the ways of responding to bullying experiences and making sense of…

This article presents an educational action research study examining how one online, classroom-based role-play simulation offers middle school students the opportunity to strengthen their agency and voice. The Jewish Court of All Time (JCAT) is a web-mediated simulation designed for middle school classrooms where students take on roles of various…

"Historical empathy" connotes "perspective taking-in-historical-context," or explaining the intentions that motivated behavior within a framework of beliefs, values, and institutions, among other factors, as they existed at some time and in some place, rather than through contemporary norms and perspectives. As a construct,…