Education and Role-Playing Games: TeachRPG – Tabletop Role-Playing Games in the Classroom, Vol II brings together a diverse group of educators and scholars who are using tabletop RPGs in their classrooms to foster deeper engagement, build community, and support transformative learning. While educational games are increasingly available, many are created by designers without classroom experience or emphasize gamification through points and badges rather than the creation of immersive, gameful environments tied to real learning outcomes.
This volume fills a critical gap by centering the voices of practitioner-scholar educators who adapt RPGs to fit their unique disciplines, institutions, and student needs. Contributors share how these games enhance cognitive and affective learning, support marginalized students, and offer meaningful pedagogical opportunities for both instructors and learners. Striking a balance between practical strategies, empirical insight, and personal narrative, Teach RPG provides adaptable models for integrating analog RPGs into a wide range of classrooms. It moves beyond theory or anecdote to show how role-playing can be a rigorous, relational, and inclusive educational practice.
Education and Role-Playing Games: TeachRPG – Tabletop Role-Playing Games in the Classroom, Vol II brings together a diverse group of educators and scholars who are using tabletop RPGs in their classrooms to foster deeper engagement, build community, and support transformative learning.
Introduction, Part I - Roll a Knowledge Check: How Tabletop RPGs Help Us
Learn,
Chapter 1 - Educational RPGs: A Practitioners Guide to Bringing the
Gaming Table into the Classroom,
Chapter 2 - Tabletop Role-Playing Games in
the Classroom: A Systems Thinking Approach for Quick Implementation and
Meaningful Learning Outcomes,
Chapter 3 - The Impact of Role-playing Game
Mechanics on the Classroom Experience, Part II - Playing Together: Creating
Inclusive Community in the Classroom Through RPGs,
Chapter 4 - Everybody
Wins: Role-Playing Games with Students with Disabilities,
Chapter 5 -
Cripping Tabletop Role-Playing Games: A Critical Analysis of Disability and
Inclusion in Inspirisles and Beyond, Part III - Class Features: Discipline
Specific Practices,
Chapter 6 - At the Crossroads of Composition, Creative
Writing, and Technical Writing: A Proposal for Teaching Tabletop Role-Playing
Game Design in Higher Education,
Chapter 7 - Role-Playing Games and Narrative
Identity as Pedagogical Tools in Teaching Fiction: A Reflection from Inside
the Classroom, Part IV - Critical Encounters: Games that Challenge and
Change,
Chapter 8 - Distributed Role-play: A Proposed Game Mechanic for
Mitigating Player Harm,
Chapter 9 - Teaching Masculinities: The
Transformative Potential of Blood Feud
Susan Haarman, PhD, is Associate Director at Loyola University Chicagos Center for Engaged Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship. She facilitates the universitys service-learning program and publishes on community-based learning. Her real love is her research on the capacity of tabletop role-playing games as formative tools for civic identity and imagination. She serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Role-Playing and is also a professional improviser and a licensed therapist.
