The Science and Art of Transformative Game Design - with Meghan Gardner - The Pudding #24

Find full show notes and links at: https://gocamp.pro/the-pudding/transformative

Using Intentional Game Design to Change Behavior and Empower Staff

In this episode, Dr. Mandi Baker and Travis Allison sit down with Meghan Gardner, CEO of Guardian Adventures and a pioneer in transformative game design. With over 25 years of experience - ranging from running LARP (Live Action Role Playing) camps to speaking at the UN General Assembly - Meghan shares a repeatable framework for turning standard camp activities into life-changing experiences. The conversation explores how "framing" an experience through invitation, calibration, and debriefing can lead to a sustained change in behavior. Meghan also dives into the concept of "alibi" in role-play, the importance of de-escalation training for staff, and how camp directors can move away from hierarchical power structures to truly empower their counselors and campers.

• 04:09 Belonging and Camp Growth
• 08:36 Defining Transformative Games
• 10:30 Framing and Calibration
• 19:00 Debrief Tools
• 25:37 Power and Empowerment
• 28:09 Roleplay Based Staff Training
• 32:07 Designing Better Scenarios
• 35:34 Apply Training Beyond Camp

Your Hosts

• Dr. Mandi Baker, Researcher - Summer Camp, Outdoor Recreation, Sociology and Hospitality/Tourism - getlamped@gmail.com
• Travis Allison, Summer Camp Consultant - Go Camp Pro - travis@gocamp.pro
• Meghan Gardner, CEO, Guardian Adventures

Thanks to our sponsors!

The American Camp Association - Illinois

The American Camp Association of Illinois is made up of nearly 289,000 members, volunteers, campers, families, and professionals who believe in the power of camp. We work to disrupt the effects of poverty by providing fundamental services for children and families, and learning opportunities for camp professionals. Learn more about ACA Illinois by visiting acail.org.

Camptivities

You know the impact you want camp to make in a child’s life. But figuring out the day-to-day details can be overwhelming. Let Camptivities help you make that impact by streamlining the creation of your camp activity schedules. Schedule a demo at camptivities.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:00

Research shows great camp experiences help kids grow, building independence, social awareness, and deeper friendships. Great programming starts with a great schedule. Camptivities build schedules around your camps rules so every camper has that high quality experience. Learn more at camptivities.com. Welcome to the pudding.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

The sweet proof of research to back up what you already know about summer camp. Hi, my name's Dr. Mandy Baker. She her.

SPEAKER_05 0:29

And I'm Travis Allison. My pronouns are he and him. Today we're talking with Megan Gardner. Megan has spent 25 years designing immersive experiences that turn play into transformation for those who play it. She's the CEO of Guardian Adventures, a lecturer visiting at Harvard. She spoke at the UN General Assembly on games as mental health intervention. Megan's research gives camp directors a repeatable framework for turning the activities that you're already running into experiences that change how kids and our staff think and behave after they go home. If you've ever struggled to explain to a parent why camp is worth it, this conversation with Megan will help. Welcome, Megan. We're grateful you're here.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

Thank you, Travis, and thank you, Mandy. It's a joy to be here.

SPEAKER_05 1:15

Well, we're super pleased. Megan and I have been friends and have lots of fun conversations about the cool way that she works and the how her program has graduated out of camp and a different spin on camp into all these bigger things that are happening. So you've been doing this for a long time, Megan. Now, can you take us back to the start? When did you first look at some form of play or role-playing scenario and think something bigger is going on here?

SPEAKER_02 1:43

Wow, that would be a very long time ago. Um, uh more than 25 years ago, that I went to a live-action role-playing game. And here in the New England area, it would have just been adults, you know, that that that go to these types of activities. And I remember um going to my first game and thinking, number one, why aren't children here? Because they would be all over this. And number two, I'm learning like fake languages and I'm learning, you know, made-up languages, I'm learning, you know, made-up folklore from the minds of the creators. Wouldn't it be cool if instead I'm learning, I it would it would benefit me as a player of the game to go learn actual languages outside of the game and bring them into the game. Wouldn't it be cool if I'm learning about real um world folklore and and legends and bringing those into the game? So uh so I hired some people and brought them into my company, which at that time was a martial arts and fencing company, hence the parent name of Garda Pink. And we started running classes and then camps, and we started exploring. I got kind of tired of the whole European, uh, Western European mythologies. And so I went and hired some cultural advisors to create programming specific to their culture with us. And um, so for an entire year we would explore a specific culture, and we would we've we did many, um, everything from um Syrian culture and and myths and legends to um the oral history of the Arawak, Taino, as well as the Ebenequi, um just all over the world, uh, Moroccan. And it was wonderful because every year I got to be a student again. Yeah. Learn all about this culture from somebody who was of that culture and had that lived experience. And we um we would design all, we had our own costume designers, mask designers, etc. And kids would come in from all over the world because this was kind of like the world's stories in one location. And they would come in and um they loved, some of them would go for the whole summer, and the stories never repeated. They would uh just pick up where they left off, and then the next year it would lead into a new culture that they would begin to explore. But during this process of running this camp for, you know, well over a thousand kids a year in between our camps and our classes and our events, I noticed that quite a few of the children are having deeply transformative experiences. And now, granted, in a live-action role-playing camp, you're going to attract a demographic of child who often feels that they're on the fringe and they're they're not accepted for any number of reasons. It might be that they're neurospicy, it might be that they just love this whole concept of a game. But whatever it is, they found a community that they belong to and a sense of belonging. And to me, for everything I do, the sense of belonging is the most important part of it, which means they can bring their full authentic self into our program and our experience. Then past that, um, it has to be also in in educational and fun and everything like that. But first and foremost is that sense of belonging. And uh so we ran these, they kept growing. We ended, excuse me, we ended up designing programs for the Princeton Review, for Royal Caribbean, and then the pandemic hit. And I had to close down my facility because I had a year-round facility running classes there and day camps there. And then I took the overnight camp and I handed it over to the nonprofit I had founded called the Story School. And and I licensed the all the IP to them to get them up on on their feet before, you know, they could so that they could so that they could take off and do their own things. And then I decided I'm gonna go and just start consulting and creating program programming, but not just in the camp industry. Uh, and so I started working with museums. I remember one year uh I spent four months down in DC. And I said, but by the end end of this four months, I will have landed the Smithsonian as a client. That's that's a big reach.

SPEAKER_03 6:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:07

Two days before the four months were up, I had Smithsonian as a client. I was so excited. So um, but now since then, I've I've also started my master's degree in transformative game design, which is a research-based degree, which I realized not only love the creative aspect of what I do, I also really love the data-driven aspect of what I do. So it's it's the science and the art. And uh as the parent of two young women, one who is a professional artist and the other who is a particleist, that makes sense. So um, so I uh have I've since gone on to develop a program that is uh is my heart's passion, and that is the GRIP program. I founded another nonprofit called Cultura Connector, and that is a nonprofit that's actually designed to help find cultural educators like the ones we work with, um, and and connect them with companies and organizations like Royal Caribbean. Um they hired us to find cultural educators for each of their ports around the world. That's like 65 ports, I think, around the world. Uh, and they specifically wanted First Nation speakers to help educate people about who the indigenous people were in this port before it became uh a Royal Caribbean port. Um and so we've been working on developing a program to help address trauma, post-crisis trauma or displaced communities trauma, utilizing these um game mechanics that I have been doing research about in my uh master's degree. And so now uh I and as you mentioned, uh I believe I actually got to speak at the United Nations General Assembly last year. And this year we're going to the World Bank to address some members of the World Bank about this. Since that, since that presentation that I did at the United Nations, uh, we're now in the process of developing a partnership with the United Nations Development Program, as well as the crisis text line, to create essentially a boots on the ground approach to addressing trauma with these analog role-playing games, um, which are not dependent upon technology, which is key when you're in a post-crisis area and technology may not be available. So I just threw a lot at you. But that's pretty much my 25-year history.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Well, I might jump to the idea of transformative experience. How do you define that? How do you describe that and how do you see it? And how do you know when you're seeing it? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 8:47

So um, first, I I like to say so the definition of transformative game design is creating games that inspire a prolonged and sustained change of behavior or perspective. I personally prefer a prolonged and sustained change of behavior because behavior is measurable. Um and kind of, you know, more of a quantitative way. Perspective can be measured through longitudinal studies, example, uh, you know, for example, with self-reported surveys and such. I I love very much like, did this actually cause a change of behavior? And one of the games I've designed during this uh masters actually had an impressively big outcome, so much so that I mean it was jaw-dropping for me because I was hoping for like a 20% response, positive response rate. And I ended up getting what was 90%, 90% change of behavior. And this was in it was pretty easy. Did you or did you not engage in this behavior? And 18 out of 20 who responded in the surveys did. So that was very impactful for me. So, and what's I think kind of what I probably should have prefaced this with is the topic of the game was in it was designed to inspire end-of-life discussions with your loved ones targeted to ages 20s and 30s.

SPEAKER_05 10:11

Right.

SPEAKER_02 10:12

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 10:13

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:14

So talk about a tough topic to a tough demographic who do not want to talk about end-of-life discussions with their parents or the loved ones. But because of our game, 18 out of 20 ended up having end-of-life discussions.

SPEAKER_05 10:29

That's great. I think, Megan, one of the things that's interesting, a lot of people listening will have had some form of formal, informal facilitation training. And certainly I think everyone in the industry is familiar with the idea of we do a thing, we we discuss it or debrief it and then figure out what happens next. But I think that that debriefing skill is pretty under trained in the industry. How do you frame it to make it easier to work with? I mean, in our case, we're talking to people who are hiring 17 to 25 year olds, but how do you how do you give people it wouldn't necessarily be just that age group, those skills to make because I think all three of us can agree that the debrief is where the the change kind of solidifies um when people acknowledge it through debriefing? I could be wrong on that.

SPEAKER_02 11:17

Well, I would I would say that it's a little more than that. Um, we call it framing the game or framing the experience. And by framing, we you need to picture an entire frame around the whole experience. And so there is basically the invitation first, the invitation to come into this liminal space where um I would like to be open to changing my view on something. So uh so basically the players are invited into this space with the understanding that they're going to be challenged to play a character that may have very different perspective than them and to be open to trying to learn more about that perspective. And then we workshop it and we calibrate, and calibration is really key because in order for people to change their mind about something, especially if it's a if it's a long-held belief, is they have to volunteer to get uncomfortable. And that can only be made possible if they feel that they are in a safe space that is calibrated to their comfort zone. In other words, here's my comfort zone, and I want to be able to step outside my comfort zone as much as I am okay with stepping outside that comfort zone. So calibration happens where if in playing the game, before I even begin to play the game, I'm gonna be given a long list of things of topics that pertain to this game, or maybe don't even pertain to the game. And I'm gonna rate whether or not I'm willing to discuss them, whether or not it's something that can be mentioned but not discussed. If nope, I don't even want this anywhere in my game. And to give you an example, I will play just about any game except for a game that involves animal abuse and child abuse. That's it. That those are my two die hard, those are things. That's it. Also, kind of uh in depending upon the function of it, I don't like any game that's going to where someone and is acting out shaming another person. That makes me deeply uncomfortable unless those people two people are consensual about it. So so that I have so that's uh a mark of let's discuss this topic before we get into it. So that happens with calibration. Then we do workshop. We haven't even gotten to the game yet. So now we workshop where I'm gonna sit in my character for a little bit, we're gonna interact as our characters, we're gonna work out how does this, how does this feel between the two of us, and we make it very clear about signals in the game. And signals are how we communicate to each other in a game in a way that doesn't necessarily break the the the the you know the immersion. And and we do that with simple, what I prefer is hand signals. So if I if if, for example, Travis, if I'm playing a character and my character's yelling at your character, and I, Megan, want to know if you, Travis, are okay with that, yeah, I'm gonna hold up my hand with a thumb to the side as I'm yelling at you. And you're gonna hold up your hand, you're either gonna go, thumbs up, which means, yeah, Megan, this is so cool. My character, I love this. We're you know, we're going at it. And that's that's often, you know, I'll see people like all trying not to break out laughing as they're doing that, like because they love it so much. But you have people who will say, thumb to the side. That means I'm not too comfortable. This is this is starting to tread into an area where I'm uncomfortable. So that tells me, Megan, time to tone down my character, time to time to just move that temperature check down, right? And if I get a thumbs down, in game, my character just gets frustrated and immediately walks away because I don't want this person basically getting triggered or peaked. So I'm giving them space. Uh, and then there are a bunch of other rules like that for how we can project or how we can basically communicate in in an in-game, out-of-game manner what we're comfortable with. So, and that allows me total and complete control over what kind of engagement I'm willing to have. Because remember that control is what allows me to get uncomfortable and to feel safe enough to be open to this new experience. After we've gone through all of this, now we enter the game.

SPEAKER_03 15:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:38

Then we go through the game, and there might be what we call mid-briefs, which are moments where we're still in the game, but we're talking about things that pertain to our lives outside of the game. So they're coming into the game through our character or through uh non-player characters. And then we end the game, and that's when our debrief happens. We roll, we say, I am Megan, I was playing this character. And now I go on to talk about my character, my character's feelings, my character's approach, moments that were memorable for my character. And the reason why this is important is because when I role-play a character, there's this really well-researched concept called alibi, which is that I dare to say and do things as Megan through the veil of my character that I would not otherwise dare to say and do. And interestingly enough, I'm actually willing to explore feelings and concepts that I Megan may not be ready to explore because it's not me, it's my character. And I can always just blame it on my character, right? If I if if it does go in a different direction. So, so basically, I just I create that space and then of debrief where I can talk about my character. And interestingly enough, there's another concept called bleed, which is what happens to my character does bleed through to me. And what happens to me does bleed through to my character. And because of that, you have the ability to have deeply transformative or even therapeutic outcomes.

SPEAKER_05 17:16

The American Camp Association's impact study shows that high-quality camp experiences build independence, social awareness, and a love for nature. And the campers lead with deeper friendships and a stronger sense of community. Those outcomes start with great programming, and great programming starts with a great schedule. Captivities build schedules with your camp's unique scheduling rules, ensuring every camper gets a consistent, engaging experiences that fosters these proven benefits. Turn research into reality at camptivities.com. Now's the time to find a better way to schedule with someone. Don't wait, next summer will be here before you know it. Captivities would love to show you the next big thing in camp. Visit camptivities.com to set up a time to chat, and let them help you get away from your desk and back out to camp. Do you have new leadership team members this summer in a full plate of to-do list items? Let ACA Illinois and Michael Brandwine help. Send your new and returning leadership team members to the annual and globally popular Brandwine on Super Staff Supervision, the quick course on outstanding skills to coach, motivate, and bring up the best in staff. This virtual training brings all of the creativity and toolbox-built techniques Michael's known for, but without having to pay for travel. This May 17th, leadership team camp staff from all around the world will gather virtually to be trained on six essential things leadership team members must do every day to encourage, coach, and lead camp staff. Learn more and join us at acil.org slash Michael Brandwin. Hurry.

SPEAKER_01 19:06

Camps being liminal spaces and providing a lot of opportunities for I often talk about like doing dress-ups with identity. So putting on those kinds of identity clothes and trying them out. Yeah. Yeah. And um, and so uh one of our questions for you is to maybe distinguish what might be different about what happens in camps, kind of uh intrinsically because of the way that they're living those spaces and what's happening in in LARP situations. How are they different? How's the design of those things different?

SPEAKER_02 19:39

Well, a lot of times camps will miss out on the debrief. And so you will have in many camps, you'll have kids have deeply powerful, immersive experiences. And then I say it's like winning a poker game and you get up from the table and you leave all your chips behind when you don't debrief. You've just won the game and you're leaving your chips behind. So, what we want to do is we want to frame the experience. Some camps are pretty good at the calibration and they're at the invitation, but at the end, you have to have that sit-down opportunity to explore what happened, what does it mean to me? What am I taking from this experience? And one of my favorite questions, what am I leaving behind?

SPEAKER_03 20:24

Right, right?

SPEAKER_02 20:25

You'd be surprised when you ask that question how often it's ignorance. That's really interesting to me. Um, so so it's that debrief process. There's also a phenomenal tool out there. It's called uh the the debrief cube. If you've ever heard of this, it's a a uh uh deck of cards. And if just look it up, he we provide the the guy who made it provides it for free uh as a PDF. They just goes through different types of debrief questions. So it's a phenomenal free tool for camps to use to start investigating how to run a good debrief. And with and with that deck of cards, you can have an 18-year-old running a debrief as long as they understand how to do that safely. And because there are certain rules of conduct in a debrief that you want to make sure that people aren't countering other people's lived experiences and other things like that.

SPEAKER_05 21:16

So the thing that comes across in this, Megan, is how intentional your design is and and how that intentional design leads to the well, the incorporation of the lessons and the emotional lessons as well. And so it can't, I mean, thinking outside of specific to role play, but thinking around designing other, and I know that most of your games involve role play, period, but just thinking about other other ways that we interact or teach kids or try to get them to have new experiences. One of the things that I think less for our listeners, but definitely for their staff, is that they are running into kids and now young adults who keep being encouraged to. Try something new in a situation, we'll just say no. What do you what does your team think about in that situation?

SPEAKER_02 22:10

Well, I would say first, has there been an actual invitation? Are you saying you gotta go here? Or are you inviting them to go there?

SPEAKER_03 22:19

Right.

SPEAKER_02 22:19

And and in the invitation, are you calibrating to what they want and what they what what makes them feel comfortable? And so there's a lot of I I would say in transformative design, you cannot force transformation upon anybody. The moment they feel pushed back just a little bit on their heels, they shut down. And that's and you will you will fail in whatever impact you wanted. You have to make space for people to feel like they have some control over the experience and that they can bring themselves, all of themselves, into that experience. So I would say if a if a child is saying no, find out why, without any judgment. You know, if they're scared, you should never counter with, well, there's nothing to be afraid of, or or just be courageous. Go more into what the fear is, and then go more into how you can adjust the situation to address their concerns. That's so key. I remember one of the funny things is I was talking with my oldest daughter the other day, and she said, you know, you raised us to be very good negotiators. And and and one of her friends said, Well, how did you do that? I said, It's pretty simple. I would pretty much allow my kids to do anything they wanted to do as long as they addressed every one of my concerns.

SPEAKER_03 23:44

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:46

So they had to address my concerns because I was the one who was uncomfortable. They got very good at thinking about how to adapt what they wanted to fit my concerns. And it's the same thing here. We have to be able to adapt the experience to fit the child so that the child feels safe enough to have a transformative experience. I think often also the one another big mistake I see is camps or or not just camps. I see this a lot in live action role-playing games. They feel that the element of surprise is really key to making that big jaw-dropping moment. Now, to a degree, they are right when the person is informed exactly what the nature of that surprise will be. Now, then people will say, well, then it's not a surprise. Let's just say that a really high level of immersion can still be had even when somebody knows what's coming. And but when they know what's coming, they also have the ability to back out or to control it to some degree so that it becomes impactful for them. Because if you break that trust by throwing something at a child or an adult that they're not prepared for, or that is triggering to them, or that just leaves a bad taste in their mouth, they're not going to trust you to do it again. So there's a dialogue that has to happen, and there's calibration that has to happen so that I can have the trust in you as a camp, as as a camper, to be able to require that you know to be able to experience this, this um, whatever this experience is.

SPEAKER_01 25:37

I think you're you're flagging some interesting ideas about control and that that's kind of resonating and running around in my head. And I I think I I think I'm starting to find some parallels in my own research language and concepts to make some sense out of it. In my my field, I would probably call this power and how we negotiate relations of power with individuals. What that does though is it raises this interesting question about how does a young person, in our case, campers, um, and sometimes young and youthful employees, negotiate to get that resource? Whether you use the language of control, I might use the language of power. Because often the assumption is that kids, kids in general don't have the power to make certain decisions or to override the decision of the generally more powerful being the counselors or the camp director. So, how do you suggest that that young person negotiate for that power? Because often young people are quite dismissed, assume not to have voice or power.

SPEAKER_02 26:38

Well, I hate to say it, but you can only negotiate it if the people in power are willing to hear it. Uh so it starts with the camp directors. Are the camp directors open to negotiating with their own staff? You know, and then if the staff feel empowered to be able to, you know, set up those types of terms between them and their management, then they will then can can then feel empowered to do the same for the children. But disempowered people have a hard time giving power to others because they don't have it themselves.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

I'd make the argument that camps in its history are built on systems of hierarchy that generally does not empower down. So it's, I think there's a uh history and by consequence a social practice that's reinforced that over a long time. How would you what would you suggest to camp directors in terms of shifting that mindset? What or yeah, since you're saying, you know, if the camp director is the first to um uh embody and to occupy a position of devolving power, you know, that kind of passing it down and that's a fair question.

SPEAKER_02 27:48

Yeah, I think that's a fair question because I've been a camp director, and I can tell you that a lot of what I'm saying I wasn't capable of doing back then. So I've made I made many of the mistakes that I'm looking at camps and going, oh, you shouldn't do that. Okay. So um from so I can speak now from my position of being much more educated about this. Um, so I think this is the beauty of role playing. Role playing is practice for real life. So, what I would do is if if staff want more power or the uh uh campers want more power, put them into situations where they can role-play their responses and I can witness that and and gain confidence in it. So um, so allow somebody a safe space to practice that decision making and role-play that role or a character or a position or a scenario. They do this in emergency response all the time. I mean, I used to train lifeguards and we would always put them into scenarios to see how they did and they gave them feedback. It's the same thing here. When you're when you are trying to train your staff, don't just talk at them. You know, put them into role-playing scenarios where they actually have to make decisions based upon you know the information that you present to them and help them through it. Don't, don't just come in and go, okay, no, that that was wrong. You know, do a debrief, talk about why they made those decisions, and then you can begin to see where it is you need to adjust your training. But I would say that if you if you have a that much concern about empowering your staff, it's likely in your staff training is the problem. And your staff training is not mimicking real life. And what I mean by that is real life isn't a person standing there talking at you. Real life is you have to make decisions. So this is about putting your staff into a slew of role-playing scenarios as they're practicing not just emergency ones. Because I think for a lot of camps, they're like, yeah, all my staff are CPR first aid trained. We know how to do lost camper drills, da da da da da, right? And they can rattle all that off. And they have some confidence in that. But they don't have confidence in um, I don't know, uh dealing with a child who has a uh who's who's being overstimulated and uh is very upset, okay, and and maybe even lashing out. Well, have they trained their staff in how to do that and have they mimicked that that type of uh behavior so that the staff can work with that? Right? So that all we we were we recently developed a program for at-risk boys, uh a therapeutic residential center here in Massachusetts for at-risk boys. And we didn't just require them to role-play the role-playing games, we required them to role-play uh as a counselor in in their playing the counselor and their camp, or their campers, their their their kids are starting to fight each other, like really fight each other.

SPEAKER_03 31:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:03

Okay, so and we didn't have the kids doing that, we had adults doing that, but they had so much experience in breaking up fights, they knew how to do it. And then then the staff person had to find a way to talk the kids down. And it was it, I we videotaped it, it was brilliant. What one of the guys there who was doing that, he now works for my company because I was just so floored by his skill set at at de-escalation. I was like, I consider myself to be pretty good at that, but you you have an incredible skill, and I want to bring you into my company. Um so I would say to do that, to focus a lot on any area you feel you're ready to start to allocate to staff and give them power. Just start designing or hire somebody to help you design role-playing scenes to help instill the confidence when you watch them provide solutions inside that role-playing game, inside that role-playing scenario, you can feel like, okay, they're they did it. They handled everything I threw at them. They know what they're doing.

SPEAKER_05 32:06

I know, Megan, that, and I know that this is coming up in your research, but also from other research before, that the way I guess the way that people get the most out of it, and obviously that's individual. Some people are going to be drastically changed by one situation, another one be like, yeah, that's kind of cool. Something that comes up in so I've heard you talk about in other things I've read that adapting into scenarios, the setup for getting a person to take on a scenario, take on a persona or a role in a scenario, is as you said, the setup is so incredibly important to this. Thinking about camp directors, a lot of the times that they're thinking about this, and I want to encourage them to think about using the scenario more. Having people act this out means that they will truly absorb the information in better ways as part of training. But I think what I've seen in camps a lot do a lot of times like here's a scenario on a recipe card, and you get one, you get one half of the card and you get the other half of the card now, show us what would happen, and then and then be like, okay, does anybody else want to step in here? Like it's very kind of loosely based on improv instead of something that's intentionally well set up. What do you think needs to be included when you s when you ask a person to take on a role when they are well role-playing scenarios of camp for its simplest version?

SPEAKER_02 33:30

Okay, and are you talking about for staff training, specifically for staff training?

SPEAKER_05 33:33

I would like to start there. Yeah, I think that creating this culture of allowing people to get to these things, as you said, it really needs to start from the top. So if the director's buying in and being more thoughtful about it, then how do we bring it to the staff? But I'm picturing the actual on the ground on the day of prepping someone to take on a role in a scenario, the child fighting in your own example.

SPEAKER_02 33:56

Yeah, I would say um encourage people to take on the whole scenario. So as opposed to just a cute card that says here's the scene, paint the bigger picture for them. Um, and then I would also add that the role-playing scenario itself is important. Yeah, the debrief afterwards, you know where I'm going, is actually more important. Because when you role play a scenario, yes, you are doing embodied uh uh um learning essentially. You you are you are expressing the the decision-making tree that that your probably your director wants you to do. But it's the debrief afterwards where you go, yeah, well, you know, okay, so I was going through and I was I was role-playing this and I my I did these this part of the decision-making tree. But inside, I felt like this may have been a better direction, right? Again, empowering people to speak about it and let let whoever the expert is in this scenario to be able to speak to that. Um, but here's another step that I think is vitally important. When we we actually have just FYI, we have a free online course about this, about how to train in a way, train your staff in a way that allows them to bring their lived experience into the training. When you are um, when you're debriefing afterwards, it's not just about what is in that scenario. You want to also have encourage people to bring in their own lived experience and their own stories about something similar to that. So if we're talking, for example, let's talk about ride safety. Uh, you know, the the kids are going to be getting on a ride, and and we have to make sure that the children always put their book bags and stuff at this specially allocated space off the ride. Um, why is that important? Can anybody name a time where they had something that that went in the wrong direction because they were carrying something with them? And now take volunteers for people to speak about, oh yeah, there was this time that uh, you know, I had a purse and it got caught up in the elevator when I was rushing to get onto the elevator.

SPEAKER_03 36:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:12

Doors went closed on it, right? Or something like that, where people are bringing in their stories. So now they are actually relating their lived experience to what you're trying to teach them. So you're creating a baseline of transferable knowledge. I am transferring what I already know about this scenario into the training scenario. And then after I've gone through the training scenario, I'm gonna do the opposite. We're gonna say, okay, now taking what you've just done today, how would that apply? Can you name some situations you could be in in your life outside of this that where this would be applicable? And somebody said might say, yeah, I babysit for you know my younger brother. I yeah, it never occurred to me that he shouldn't be bringing his uh you know phone or whatever with him on the ride. But also just, you know, processes like how you take your seatbelt on and off, getting in and out of the car. There could be any number of scenarios that people begin to translate that training to their life outside. And that step is significant because that translation process is what gets you to change their perspective. It's why, and when they walk out of there, they will remember that because it hasn't just been training for here at camp, it's training that is applicable to my life outside of camp. So, what does this training mean to me as a person, not just me as a camp counselor, as a staff member? That's right. Not just as a staff member, but me. How could I take this idea and apply it to my life? That's when you get real shifts in perspective.

SPEAKER_01 38:01

Where can people learn more about your research and this work?

SPEAKER_02 38:06

Um, so my uh website is guardup.com, g-u-ar-d-up.com. Uh, that's our consulting agency. And then our nonprofit is called Cultura Connector. That's think of culture but with an A, culturaconnector.com. And that's our nonprofit. And that's uh where we basically help cultural educators get hired by companies or organizations who want to explore their culture. Uh, and in that way they are doing in a way that's authentic from somebody who has that lived experience. But then also that's the um distribution channel for our therapeutic live action role-playing games that we're hoping the World Bank will be rolling out soon.

SPEAKER_05 38:50

That's great. Well, Megan, thank you so much for being a part of the pudding. If folks are looking for resources, they can go to our show notes or to the page on gocamp.pro to hear more about this. We're really grateful, Megan.

SPEAKER_01 39:04

Thank you so much. And if you didn't know, now you know camp pros.

SPEAKER_00 39:09

Hey Camp Pros, we love that our industry is built on sharing. In order to foster that spirit, if you've gotten even one good idea from a Go Camp Pro podcast, masterclass, from the Summer Camp Professionals Group, a conference, or wherever else, we ask that you give credit where credit is due. That way, it'll encourage camp pros to keep freely sharing their ideas and make the camp industry as a whole better.