Students collectively design a game on a polarizing topic and are stimulated to explore and gain a deeper understanding of various perspectives and presuppositions (including their own), recognize rhetorical narratives and frames, and devise strategies to overcome these. Students adopt active listening skills when conversing with one another. Playing Perspectives is based on game-based and transformative learning principles.

Playing Perspectives consists of three phases. These can be conducted consecutively or separate from one another as stand alone activities, depending on the time available, your learning objectives and the desire to have a playable game as end product. The materials that are developed by students in each of these phases can be uploaded onto Edusources and used by other teachers if they only want to conduct one of the later phases as stand alone activity.

Playing Perspectives was developed as part of the Utrecht University Comenius project Fostering an Open Mind and Open Attitude in Higher Education that strives to stimulate perspective taking and dialogue in academic education with creative learning activities. The other learning activities that have been developed as part of the Open Minds project are the Open Mind digital game and The Square (Het Vlak; a creative dialogue methodology).

Please note: the photos required for phase 1 can be downloaded from the Teaching & Learning Collection of the UU (see links).