THE WORLDBUILDING WORKSHOP

TEACHING CRITICAL THINKING AND EMPATHY THROUGH WORLD MODELING, SIMULATION, AND PLAY

A research-based instructional approach that cultivates critical thinking, empathy, and inquiry through collaborative environmental and societal modeling.

The Worldbuilding Workshop is the first comprehensive treatise on worldbuilding as an educational tool for deconstructing, analyzing, and contextualizing the planet’s most urgent, mind-boggling questions.

The process unfolds across six stages that collectively encourage hypothesis formation, research, group discussion, and systems modeling. By interrogating Governmental, Economic, Social, and Cultural forces at various points in space and time, learners are prompted to reflect on:

  1. How these forces came to be in the first place;

  2. How different people experience(d) these forces based on their respective socioeconomic and sociocultural contexts; and

  3. How each of us can shape these forces within our shared reality.

Beyond advocacy for avant-garde technologies or flash-in-the-pan activities, co-authors Trent Hergenrader and Stephen Slota point to worldbuilding as a strategy for reconfiguring education to meet 21st-century challenges and teach critical thinking as well as its less-talked-about sibling, empathy.

Featured topics include:

  • How and why worldbuilding is supported by contemporary theories of human thinking and learning (e.g., constructionism, situated cognition);

  • Interrelationships between constructivist teaching and assessment practices;

  • How instructors and learners can co-develop accurate representations of worlds set in specific places and times;

  • Geographies and demographies of worlds;

  • Creation of ethical character sketches that capture broad characteristics of diverse populations;

  • And how instructors and learners can interact with co-constructed worlds through simulation and role-play.

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AVAILABLE DECEMBER 2

ENDORSEMENTS

  • “The Worldbuilding Workshop shows how to center imagination—our mind’s world-building, time-traveling power—at the heart of education in a world that urgently needs it.”

    James Paul Gee, Regents Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University; author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

  • “A genuinely new, practical, and much-needed pedagogy for playful and connected learning. Where everything zigs to numbers and algorithms, The Worldbuilding Workshop zags to role-play and narrative to nurture humanistic inquiry of our complex worlds.”

    Sebastian Deterding, Chair of Design Engineering, Imperial College London; co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Role-Playing Game Studies

  • “I couldn’t tell you what the book is actually about, but we’re all very proud of Stephen and Trent.”

    JoAnn Slota, Stephen’s Mother

  • "Can we go play Minecraft or something...?"

    G$ and Anders, Trent’s Children

  • "Easily the best and most important text in all of human history."

    Brent Shmergenrader, Local Rabble Rouser

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

TRENT HERGENRADER, co-author of The Worldbuilding Workshop, is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Worldbuilding and Storytelling at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. He is the author of Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers.

STEPHEN SLOTA, co-author of The Worldbuilding Workshop, is a leading educational technologist, learning theorist, and interactive storyteller who has directed numerous digital education and instructional design projects on behalf of CVS Health, Arizona State University, the University of Connecticut, Intel Corporation, and Pfizer.

BRYAN ALEXANDER, author of The Worldbuilding Workshop foreword, is a senior scholar at Georgetown University as well as a futurist, writer, and creator of the Future of Higher Education Observatory. His forthcoming book is titled Peak Higher Education, published by Johns Hopkins University Press.