Practitioner Spotlight
It’s Complicated: Roleplaying Development Scenarios with the Kin and Country Framework
The context
We used the Kin and Country Framework as part of a role play assessment for first year university students.
The course – GEOG1030: Global Poverty and Development introduces students from a diverse range of degree programs to some of the predominant theories and processes of development shaping the 20th and 21st centuries.
As students begin to engage with the immense complexity of development issues and scenarios, one of the longstanding assessments in the course has asked students to role play the ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ of a hypothetical development scenario from a range of stakeholder perspectives. In this assessment, different groups of students would represent and advocate for different stakeholders during the in-class role play, in order to highlight the challenges of reaching consensus and meeting the needs, goals and aspirations of all affected by development projects. However, while focused on ‘walking in someone else’s shoes’, the strength of this assessment was also its weakness: it’s tricky (and can often be highly inappropriate and damaging) to appropriately represent and ‘speak for’ someone else.
Enter the Kin and Country Framework! Having been generously introduced to the framework by Dr Lauren Tynan (and by other colleagues teaching our third-year development course) this framework offered a beautiful way to shift from trying to ‘represent’ others, to working together and integrating different perspectives, insights and ways of knowing, being and doing in navigating complexity.
Instead of being assigned individual stakeholders to represent during the role play scenario, students were put into groups and asked to approach the scenario from a particular perspective in the framework (i.e. Eagle, Ant, Grandmother, Granddaughter).
During the role play itself, each group was invited to share their initial thoughts on the scenario from their unique perspective (in this case, a hydropower development), before asking other groups questions about their own perspectives, and sharing their own insights in response.
In this context, students were not assessed on their capacity to argue and defend their own perspectives, but on their capacity to learn from and collaborate with others in response to the development scenario.
In the course more broadly, students begin to learn about the ways in which predominantly Western, modernist and neo-liberal approaches to economy and ‘progress’ have compounded disadvantage and marginalisation for many. Using the Kin and Country Framework also provides an opportunity to shift away from some of these harmful modalities, and offers students an opportunity to do (not just listen to or read about) an example of myriad Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing together.
‘I don’t know’ is an answer (and you can change your mind).
Key Learnings
Curiosity, not competition: In using the Kin and Country Framework to engage with a complex scenario, many students found ‘success’ was not achieved through competing with one another, but by working together and being curious about each other’s insights and perspectives. This felt counterintuitive for many students, who’s experiences of assessment has often trained them to compete, rather than to meaningfully collaborate.
Being together differently, process rather than outcome: Students observed that using the Kin and Country Framework guided them to be together differently. More than one student went out of their way to support one another in speaking to the group, sharing insights and contributing to the bigger picture they were shaping, and others expressed gratitude to their peers for helping them to learn something new.