Agency and Authority in Role-Playing "Texts"

 What was the chapter about/What does this chapter tell you about teaching students?

In this chapter, Jessica Hammer discusses role playing and the difficulties that secondary authors face while role-playing. She defines role playing using a definition by Mackay as, "an episodic and participatory story-creation system that includes a set of quantified rules that assist a group of players and a gamemaster in determining how their fictional characters’ spontaneous interactions are resolved" (p. 69). However, she adds that role-play must include narration, improvisation, and collaboration. She also notes that it is crucial for role-playing texts to include both agency and authority (agency, meaning the capability an individual has of taking action, and authority, meaning the ability to enforce/evaluate those actions). Going back to my first statement, secondary authors must also respond to the actions of the teritary authors (who write the text of the game play) in order to have full participation. Hammer discusses how authority functions differently in role-playing games versus traditional texts. In traditional texts, the author is able to explicitly state and point out the events of the story, but in role-playing, no one individual can state what is going to happen next. It's a mystery! Role-playing provides challenges to both authority and agency. This article also tells us in terms of teaching our students that the connecting of meaning through text and the reader changes in terms of traditional text versus role-playing. In traditional text, readers make connections after they have read. In role-play, readers themselves are constructing the meaning while they are reading it! This is important knowledge as an educator. Role-playing helps allow students to become "producers, rather than consumers, of narratives. Role-playing opens texts to a new kind of participation- one that can be either enabled by, or constrained by, the affordances of technology" (p. 90). 

Can this chapter be applied in your content area?

I do not think the way Hammer talks about technology in this chapter would be useful in a K-5 classroom. However, the older students get, the more this might become a helpful tool in their learning!