Abstract
Policy education needs innovative pedagogies to facilitate learning of soft and hard skills required to tackle wicked problems of the twenty-first century. As experiential learning is increasingly found useful, we observe a shift from lecture-based teaching to engagement of active learning tools in the classroom. This change enables the use of games and simulations as alternative teaching tools for enhancing learning of concepts and skills useful for a collaborative and adaptive response to real-world problems.
This chapter puts forward a six-step pedagogical strategy for facilitating experiential learning of students about complexity of disaster risk and vulnerability, apply systems perspective and unpack nuances of adaptive governance.
This pedagogical strategy and analytical framework to evaluate students’ learning can also be used to design rubric for teaching in similar multi-and inter-disciplinary modules where games are used to acknowledge plurality, integrate knowledge and reflect on real-world policy issues.
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Notes
- 1.
The pedagogical steps are not part of the game but designed by the authors. The game is played with students of RC4 since AY 17–18 but the use of samples of previous students’ work was added in AY 19–20. An official peer-review report for this module helped the first author to make this modification.
- 2.
Testimonial from students’ feedback report—“… He made the module less overwhelming with the Forest Risk game where we learnt to apply our skills which were slightly stressful because of the unknown, but we learnt a lot through applying it in the final project.”
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Acknowledgements
This chapter is part of the project “Measuring Learning Outcomes of University Town College Programme (UTCP) in Residential College 4 (RC4): Examining the Constructively Aligned Living-Learning Environments”, which is supported by “Teaching Enhancement Grant” (TEG) from Centre for Development of Teaching and Learning (CDTL), National University of Singapore (NUS)”. The authors are thankful to all the students of academic year 19–20 of the NUS-RC4 module Thinking in systems: Disaster resilience for their consent to use data from their assignments.
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Varma, N., Liu, W. (2022). Potential of a Serious game in Teaching and Learning of Systems Thinking and System Dynamics in a Multi-disciplinary Classroom. In: Nair, S., Varma, N. (eds) Emerging Pedagogies for Policy Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5864-8_9
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