To Form a More Perfect Union: Using Experiential Simulations to Create Empathetic Changemakers
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Fear of a decline in American democracy has focused a national conversation on the role civics education should play to create a more knowledgeable, empathetic, empowered citizenry. I designed and taught an eight hour, once-a-week civics and U.S. history curriculum primarily utilizing simulations and experiential education to 159 fourth grade students from three different Bay Area elementary schools. I use observational, survey self-report, and interview data to examine to what extent students participating in American historical simulations increase their empathy and empowerment, with reflections on my own experience as their teacher. Lesson topics included redlining, Japanese Incarceration camps, confirmation bias, and inequality built into the Constitution. Despite outliers and insufficient quantitative evidence, data from surveys, interviews, and observations support findings that students enacting emotionally engaging simulations in which they were given active roles and agency were successful in increasing greater levels of empathy for each other and for people affected by discriminatory policies discussed through those activities. They improved their knowledge of the government and confidence in their abilities to make a difference in the government and their communities through protests and other political actions. As a teacher, I became aware of my biases to design activities for students with personalities similar to my own and learned that I must find a balance between lectures and experiential simulations in my future classrooms. Overall, this research supports utilizing experiential learning simulations to increase empathy and belief in students’ abilities to positively change their world.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date modified | December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | June 7, 2022; May 2022 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Forstall, Freya |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor | Garcia, Antero |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University |
| Department | Graduate School of Education |
Subjects
| Subject | United States history |
|---|---|
| Subject | United States civics education |
| Subject | United States democracy |
| Subject | Experiential learning |
| Subject | Simulation games in education |
| Subject | Education, Elementary |
| Subject | Empathy |
| Subject | American government |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Article |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Forstall, F. (2022). To Form a More Perfect Union: Using Experiential Simulations to Create Empathetic Changemakers. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/zd236qb8595
Collection
Undergraduate Honors Theses, Graduate School of Education
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- Contact
- freyaf@stanford.edu
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