The Research

Killian Lund, V., Jones, K., Thrailkill, L. “Darian,” Smith, K. J., & Edmiston, F. (2026). Crafting speculative roleplaying games for teacher education: Questioning power and centering empathy in schools. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 23(1), 118–142.

Abstract

Our collective of teacher educators and researchers share the contours of a collaboration on a critical arts-based research project. We attend to the ways we collaboratively composed a table-top roleplaying game, a text intended to support players in co-creating their own speculative fiction. Our game, We Know Something You Don’t Know, was designed in the Belonging Outside Belonging system (Alder, Citation2018) to support collaborative speculative storytelling in learning settings. Specifically, we aimed to support preservice and in-service teachers’ reflection on how the power structures of schooling frame some children as troublemakers (Shalaby, Citation2017), and to engage with Shalaby’s call to consider what those troublemakers might teach us about dysfunctional structures of schooling. Our findings suggest that our collaborative composing was shaped by immediations (Ehret et al., Citation2019)– moments of yes which led to decisions around what should be fixed or stay open for players, recursively sparking further immediations.

Application in Process

When children are labeled as “troublemakers,” educators can ask what their behavior reveals about unmet needs, unfair structures, or narrow expectations—not just how to make the behavior stop.

Roleplaying games can give teachers a low-stakes space to practice seeing classroom situations from multiple perspectives and imagine responses grounded in empathy, dignity, and justice.

I think of this game as a gift to the troublemakers I have known, taught, loved, and been—a way of honoring what they taught me about becoming a more responsive, empathetic educator. This research was important to me because I believe play is one of the most powerful ways we learn how to be human together, especially when we are trying to rethink the systems that shape children’s lives.

Virginia Killian Lund