Original Goals of the Assignment

This assignment was originally designed for “Introduction to American Government” classes taught at George Washington University. Its goals were twofold: to integrate work by and about women of color in the undergraduate curriculum (as part of a Ford Foundation Grant) and to more fully utilize the resources available in the nation's capital. To meet these objectives while still teaching the basics of an introductory course that ranged from 50 to 250 students, I designed a role-playing assignment that was to be completed by students outside of class. To incorporate women of color in the course, I created a variety of minority women roles. I encouraged students to directly engage the capital by requiring them to use at least one “direct experience” in their research. They were asked to go somewhere to either observe the political process or to talk to someone involved in it. They needed to use the experience to better understand their person, her problem, or the political system she confronted.

The second goal of exploring the nation's capital is no longer relevant now that I teach outside of the Washington area. However, the value of moving beyond the library can still be actualized outside the capital. Although there are fewer opportunities to directly observe government in action in Central Pennsylvania, the interactive experience required of students has remained a vital and doable part of the paper. Students either email or telephone people in other cities, visit local interest groups or government actors, or use the college's experts, organizations, and visiting speakers to fulfill the direct experience requirement. Students are asked to provide an appendix to their papers in which they describe their experience and what they learned from it. When students have experiences that do not result in substantive information, they can still get credit by reflecting on what they learned about the political process from the obstacles they encountered. Many students report that their experiences provided them with the most meaningful insights into their person, his/her problem, or politics generally.

This role-playing assignment also served an implicit goal for “Introduction to American Government:” coverage. As any introductory text will illustrate, this course has no time to spare. Therefore, the assignment was designed to require little class time. Although students incorporate examples from their research in various class discussions, only two class periods are dedicated to the assignment. The first is a day to introduce the assignment and answer students' questions. Because of its uniqueness, it is important to take time to talk students through the assignment and forewarn them of the iterative nature of the project. I also find it useful to include one of our librarians at this meeting to instruct them on relevant research techniques. The second day is when students share their findings and we discuss the implications of the case studies for understanding politics.

Assignment Requirements

First, students are randomly assigned a role from a list I have created (see Appendix A for a list of recently used roles).¹

Now that I teach classes of 35 students, I ensure that each student has a different role. This helps diminish the temptation to cheat, cuts down on the frustration of sharing limited library resources, and empowers students by giving them an opportunity to develop a specific expertise beyond that of anyone else in the class. Since part of the goal is to get students to walk in someone else's shoes, they are not allowed to reject a role. Sometimes a few students complain that their roles are harder, less interesting, or even less likeable than other people's. However, once they start their research, they quickly gain an affinity for the role.

Each role contains more than one piece of information about the fictional person so that the student has some flexibility in selecting a problem. The problem they select might result from a single attribute or a combination. For example, the problem of a “Hispanic female prison guard” might be one having to do with her race, her sex, her occupation, or problems faced by women prison guards in particular or of importance to Hispanic prison guards or Hispanic women.

The one thing the roles have in common is that they have limited finances (none of the people are upper-middle-class or rich). The financial resources vary from moderate (“a struggling small businesswoman in New York's Chinatown”) to low (“a manic depressive who lives in public housing”). Students cannot change the resources the person could be assumed to have from their description. For example, they cannot write: “this person just won the lottery, so his unemployment problem is solved.”

To avoid picking inappropriate, stereotypical, or simplistic issues, research is needed to learn something about the person and his/her situation. For example, a student could argue that a problem of “an elderly Chicago resident living on social security” would be prescription drug costs and use data to support this selection. Whereas it would be an unacceptable selection to choose the issue of abortion rights and justify it by saying that “it's a hot issue that everyone cares about.” Since selecting the issue is an important part of the assignment, students are warned not to rush through this step. Before they research an issue they have to “get to know the person.” One way to do this is to read newspaper and newsmagazine articles and to use the web, even though the paper's bibliography requires additional more scholarly materials.

Although some of the same roles are used from semester to semester, the problems chosen are rarely the same. Some students use the experience to help identify a problem. They conduct interviews to figure out what problems their person might have. One student selected sexual harassment as the problem that faced his “enlisted black servicewoman” after using an Internet chat room to talk to women in the Armed Forces. Another student talked to employees at the local hospital to better understand the duties and privacy rights of “a hospital orderly who is HIV-positive.” Some students study or contact interest groups to find out what political problems they are working on and how these would impact particular types of people. Contact with a representative of the Indian Youth of America organization led to a paper on amendments to the Indian Child Welfare Act (for the “Native American social worker”). Another successful approach for identifying a problem is to put terms from the role (such as “homosexual,” “cocaine,” or “autism”) into search engines on web pages that categorize recent bills, court cases, or regulations.

The paper requires a substantial discussion of the problem itself and the historical and contemporary debate surrounding it. This includes describing the different sides of the issues, who advocates these, and why. Students need to explain the governmental jurisdiction of the issue and how actions of the various branches of government have created the status quo. Books, government documents (such as congressional hearings), and academic articles that deal with the issue are important for this part of the paper. In addition to this traditional research and the use of web pages, students can utilize more hands-on research approaches. Once an issue is identified, calls and emails to congressional offices, executive agency staff, interest groups, and academic experts can help students understand the policy specifics and jurisdiction complexities.

Finally, the paper needs to include what actions the person will take to change public policy. These need to be both comprehensive and specific. For example, I want to know which government officials and agencies the person will contact and why. To prevent students from providing overly general suggestions, such as “I will call my congressmen and ask him/her to fix the problem,” an assignment sheet provides questions that push toward specificity (see Appendix B online).²

These include: “What congressional committee or subcommittee considers legislation on this issue? Has legislation already been introduced that your person wants supported, opposed, or amended? Which members would you consider your allies on this committee? Why?” To be comprehensive, students need to be more active than simply contacting legislators. One way to do this is to discuss interest groups the person could join or support and include information on what those groups are doing and why they are relevant. Students have also described class action suits and civil disobedience strategies in this section of the paper.

One student's paper can illustrate the ways that experiences can inform the selection of the problem, a discussion of the status quo, and action the person wants taken. The student's role was that of a “low-income single mother.” She began her research on the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare web page and found a local phone number for the Cumberland County Assistance Office. She interviewed a welfare caseworker in this office in order to get a sense of the problems that might confront this person. “My experience with Ms. ______ opened my eyes to the long process so many low-income mothers have to go through in order to support their families.”

From this interview, the student concluded that her person needed to have more childcare support and a system that required her to work fewer hours to qualify for welfare so that she could pursue an education and eventually “break out of the welfare system.” To find out more about these issues, the student used scholarly journals (including an article from The Annals), interest group web pages (including the National Organization of Women's “Legislative Alert and Updates”), and government documents accessed through the web (including a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). From this research, she decided that her person needed to try to block H.R. 4090 from passing because it would increase the number of hours she would need to work to be eligible for the welfare she currently received and she would try to get H.R. 4092 passed. H.R. 4092 would help with her childcare needs.

After learning about these two bills, the student again turned to the telephone. She called her local congressman's office and talked to his legislative assistant about the bills and the representative's positions on them. Because she was well versed on the issue, she was able to have a substantively rich conversation with the aid that enhanced the specificity of her paper. She then turned again to the web to learn more about the committee and subcommittee with jurisdiction over the bill and their members by using the Project Vote-Smart web page and Thomas.gov. She knew when the bill got stuck in committee and talked to the legislative assistant about alternative plans.

The papers are due at the end of the semester and are generally six to eight pages long. On the last day of class, students are put into small groups for discussions. In addition to talking about the particulars of their issues, they are asked to revisit questions asked throughout the course: “Is this evidence of pluralism or elitism? How much power do average people have in the United States?” This conversation is continued after we reconvene as a whole class. Another alternative would be to organize students into panels around certain themes (i.e., economic issues, medical issues) or subgroups (i.e., Hispanics, gays, immigrants) and have them present their research to the class. The assignment is sufficiently rich to allow for more than one class session to share the findings and experiences.

During this discussion, students disagree on how open the system is to meaningful input from people with limited resources. Their opinions are based on the substance of their papers and their direct experiences. Some conclude from their unsuccessful efforts to interact with political actors that it would be difficult (some say “impossible”) for their person to affect change. Their experience appendices are full of stories about “getting the runaround” and “hitting a brick wall” when they called government offices (and sometimes interest groups). One student concluded after his conversation with an information officer at the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, “had I really been a salmon fisherman from Puget Sound, I would have gone berserk.” Another indicated that: “I have not received information from Senator ______, just his deepest gratitude for being interested in the agriculture of Iowa and the wellbeing of our country.” Their pessimism is reinforced by the realization that as college students in a government class they are better positioned to get information than many of the people they were assigned.

Other students feel empowered by the assignment and optimistic about individuals' power to elicit change. They comment on the depth of experience, interest, and commitment of people they contact, many whom fall outside of the domain of “official” political actors. Students find compelling the examples of how people who were “caught in the system” ended up changing it or dedicated their lives to helping others. The accessibility of some of the individuals they contact also impresses them. One student concluded: “It amazed me how easy it was to contact your State Representative and attain information on his/her views on specific pieces of legislation.”

The papers are worth 20% of the overall grade. They are evaluated for thoroughness, clarity, and depth. I use an evaluation sheet (see Appendix C online) to make specific comments on the selection of the problem, issue discussion, action taken, use of sources and experience, and writing.³

Papers are not particularly difficult to grade because they tend to fall into three categories—excellent (well researched, clearly written, comprehensive, and specific), adequate, or poor (superficial and sloppy, demonstrating little effort). One problem I have faced in grading is how much to punish students who sidestep the requirement that the person attempt to change the status quo. Some students write about how their person would use government institutions or laws to solve their problem. For example, a paper might describe how an “unemployed person living in Biloxi” would apply for unemployment compensation or food stamps. These papers can be thorough and accurate, but they do not tackle certain challenges of the assignment. Warning students about this problem has helped to minimize it.

Like most innovations in the classroom, some students respond enthusiastically to the assignment and others dislike it. A few of my weaker students have had difficulty understanding the assignment and have given up rather than work through their frustration or follow my suggestions. Procrastination has particularly damning consequences because of the creative and multi-faceted approaches that are needed. However, most students find the project worthwhile and manageable. Some have high praise for it. Recent comments reveal that some of the goals of the assignment are being realized:

Strengths of the Assignment

In contrast to a passive study of politics, role playing involves students in a process and provides them with more direct experience (Endersby and Webber 1995). Beyond the benefits of active learning generally, this assignment helps to democratize an American government course by taking the focus away from how political insiders interact with each other and putting it on how regular people with limited resources affect and are effected by government decisions. Along the way, students learn about government actors, policies, and people with lives different from their own. They also acquire research skills that have practical application for their future as citizens.

Most role-playing assignments require time, sophistication, and a cast size that makes them impractical for many introductory courses at small schools (Josefson and Casey 2000). Sometimes, entire semesters and multiple classes are dedicated to intense simulations (Endersby and Webber 1995; Josefson and Casey 2000). Unlike those simulations, this assignment is done by individuals, rather than groups, and is done primarily outside of class time. This makes it appropriate for classes of various sizes and allows it to be added to a traditional class without a substantial amount of material being dropped or redesigned. It takes politics out of a literal space (i.e., in Congress or in a Congress recreated in a classroom) thereby reinforcing the idea that politics happens wherever interests are organized and articulated, rather than simply in elite settings.

Another problem sidestepped in this assignment is that of deciding how to assign students to roles that are inherently unequal. In many of the congressional and executive branch simulations, roles vary greatly from high to low-profile, familiar to unfamiliar, and major players to minor ones (Newmann and Twigg 2000). Teachers who use these elite simulations are often confronted with the dilemma of either reproducing inequality in the classroom by giving some students more central and active roles than others or of distorting the reality of the roles in order to equalize the students' responsibilities and importance. In contrast, there is no explicit hierarchy in the roles assigned here. All of the people are equally important to the exercise. All of the students have the same sized challenge. This is superior to simulations that require little activity from some students and lots of work out of others.

Interest and identification with the issue, problem, and person varies by student, but for most students this assignment teaches a variety of things. They become experts on a particular issue and see how policies on it are the result of many actors and actions. They learn that politics is not something that happens in a particular place by a small group of people of a certain type. They also gain experience and tools useful for fighting their own political problems. Last, but certainly not least, the assignment encourages students to look at other people and their problems through more informed and empathetic eyes.