A research-based instructional approach that cultivates critical thinking, empathy, and inquiry through collaborative environmental and societal modeling.
The Worldbuilding Workshop is the first comprehensive treatise on worldbuilding as an educational tool for deconstructing, analyzing, and contextualizing the planet’s most urgent, mind-boggling questions.
The process unfolds across six stages that collectively encourage hypothesis formation, research, group discussion, and systems modeling. By interrogating Governmental, Economic, Social, and Cultural forces at various points in space and time, learners are prompted to reflect on:
How these forces came to be in the first place;
How different people experience(d) these forces based on their respective socioeconomic and sociocultural contexts; and
How each of us can shape these forces within our shared reality.
Beyond advocacy for avant-garde technologies or flash-in-the-pan activities, co-authors Trent Hergenrader and Stephen Slota point to worldbuilding as a strategy for reconfiguring education to meet 21st-century challenges and teach critical thinking as well as its less-talked-about sibling, empathy.
Featured topics include:
How and why worldbuilding is supported by contemporary theories of human thinking and learning (e.g., constructionism, situated cognition);
Interrelationships between constructivist teaching and assessment practices;
How instructors and learners can co-develop accurate representations of worlds set in specific places and times;
Geographies and demographies of worlds;
Creation of ethical character sketches that capture broad characteristics of diverse populations;
And how instructors and learners can interact with co-constructed worlds through simulation and role-play.
The book expands on ideas presented in Hergenrader’s (2018) Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers as well as case-based applications of the Collaborative Worldbuilding Card Deck.
