I’ve been thinking about hope lately. It’s winter here in New York City. There are certain things about the season here that feel hopeful: the smell of Christmas trees on some street corners where lots have popped up, the twinkle of lights along the railings of brownstones, and even some of the neighborhood dogs have gotten in on the spirit with bedazzled sweaters glinting as they sniff at the concrete. However, in the hallways and in the classrooms of my high school, students and teachers drag in despair.
There’s a lot to worry about: finances (where I teach in the Bronx everyone gets a free school lunch), climate change, and the job market… High school is also the place where we tend to stop pulling our punches in our teaching of history. I can always tell when students begin to learn about the Holocaust or about the fate of Native Americans. High school is where we’ve decided as a society that students are old enough to know more, and we get real about how bad it has been. under the weight of this new understanding, many students feel that the future too is bleak.
It is considering this climate that I started looking for ways in my classes to teach students to think, write, and create from a place of hope. We often ask students to write argumentative essays where they take a stance and identify steps we should take, but the idea is always that it will be the audience reading their words who will take those next steps and change the future. (Unfortunately, that audience is often just me, their lowly English teacher who is more likely to circle boxes on a rubric than take bold next steps after reading their conclusion.) But what if the students were creating change not just recommending it? What if we started a project from the spirit of the next steps in their conclusions?
Enter: Transformative Games.
Transformative Games are games designed to create player transformations. This idea is inspired by Sabrina Culyba’s free book The Transformative Framework. She’s a game designer who works on games for player transformation and has developed this free tool to take people through the design process. First, I began playing transformative games and asking students to play some. We started reflecting on their experiences, especially how the games helped build empathy. English class is an empathy factory, but games really kick that into overdrive because we are co-creating and complicit in the outcomes of games through our moves as the player.
Some of the free transformative games my students play include:
- The Waiting Game (a web-based game about the lengthy process of seeking asylum)
- Broke: The Game (an app game that puts you in one of several roles of people making tough financial decisions)
- Killing Me Softly (a web-based game about micro-aggressions)
- Harmony Square (a web-based game that educates people about bots and trolls–the dark side of social media)
- The Climate Game (a web-based game about trying to reach net zero by 2050)
- We Become What We Behold (a web-based game on social contagion and hate)
Next, using Culyba’s framework, I ask students to design their own game for player transformation: How did they wish they could transform people’s behavior and ideas? They design a slide deck to pitch a game aimed at a specific player transformation. Along the way, I model the design process on a slide deck I created for a existing game called Never Alone, an amazing game by Upper One Games that empowers Alaska Native youth through stories from their culture.
For a link to my slides, which served as our mentor text for the student’s slide decks of their own transformative games, click here. Also included in the link: an assessment sheet, a screencast of me pitching the slides and a student example.
The goal of this project is to leave students with hope, to empower them to think deeply about what it takes to transform a person. Of course, it is important that students know what we are up against and what we’ve been through, but I wish for them to also know that transformation is possible if we create enough empathy through art and critical play.
This work was also presented at the National Council of English Teachers Conference this year in collaboration with Rachel Besharat Mann from Wesleyan University @rbmann.bsky.social. For a copy of our slides from the presentation, click here.
How do you teach for hope? I’d love to know and catch up with you on BlueSky @kakeener.bsky.social or at www.kkeener.com.
K. Keener is an English teacher with over 20 years in the classroom. When not teaching she leads coffee tours around New York City, writes and tries to find something new to learn.
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