Student-as-Partners in Game Design for Teaching Citizenship in Higher Education

Abstract

<p>Within higher education, teaching citizenship-related competencies and orientations such as ethics, empathy, and social responsibility is often complicated and problematic due to the dominant emphasis on graduate employability. This paper presents a case study of a pilot co-curricular programme involving twelve (12) undergraduate and postgraduate students from mixed disciplinary backgrounds designing non-digital analogue games to teach citizenship concepts. The Student-As-Partners (SaP) programme, structured around the design thinking process, consisted of workshops, consultations, and game-play sessions to guide students towards conducting their own research around citizenship education, designing, prototyping, and facilitating their games to audiences of student peers. Data collected included the questionnaire survey, interviews, and students’ outputs, including the game artefacts and manual, promotional poster and video, and post-event reflection videos. Students selected citizenship themes related to sustainability, corporate ethics, individual responsibility, and misinformation. Our findings indicate that theme selection steered game design towards story-centred or mechanics-driven experiences and how the SaP process supported the development of ‘serious games’ while offering students substantial influence and control of decision-making. The results demonstrate how games offer modest but effective opportunities for potentially transformative learning of citizenship values and orientations required for future-ready graduates to critically negotiate the dominant neoliberal orthodoxy of the knowledge economy and shifting global dependencies.</p><p>Keywords: educational games in higher education, citizenship education, serious gaming, student-as-partners, future readiness <br></p>