Using Interactive Drama to Teach the Complexities of Decision Making

摘要

Imagine your students becoming so engaged in a class activity that they could hardly remain in their seats. Imagine managerial decision making "coming alive" and students gaining an in-depth appreciation of the richness of the issues―black and white blurring to shades of gray. In this paper, we describe an innovative experiential learning tool that provides unique access to the complexity of decision science topics; this tool is known as interactive drama. Instructors work with trained actors to create interactive scenes based on a decision-making dilemma adapted from a case from their discipline. We have used interactive drama based on the premise that it is often difficult to grasp the full complexity of certain topics by hearing or reading about them. Instead, if the students can experience the topic and perhaps try out their ideas for solutions to the problem, they gain a much deeper understanding of the topic. Many instructors use role plays (Brookfield, 2000), videos (Champoux, 2000; Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2001) or other teaching technology (e.g., CD simulations) to increase student participation and engagement. These are useful tools. We view interactive drama as another effective tool that not only increases student engagement (Silberman, 1996) but also allows students to explore complex issues in any course under the decision sciences umbrella. In the following pages, we explain how to incorporate interactive drama into your course and discuss how this tool impacts learning.