Performing Politics in the Classroom: How students enact scenario competence in an ICT-supported educational role-play

My aim in this paper is to answer the following research question: How can learning games be used in order to enact scenario competence? The question is based on the assumption that learning games hold a considerable learning potential by letting students engage in various simplified aspects of professional practices that exists outside of the formal learning space of a school. The paper is divided into two parts. First, I define and discuss the concepts of “competence” and “scenario competence” and their relationship to learning games and simulated practices. In the second part, I describe four analytical themes from my empirical work on students’ participation in the ICT-supported role-play The Power Game on election processes and political communication. At the end of the paper, I will discuss how the students enacted scenario competence in different ways by participating in the game. The Power Game has been codeveloped with The National Danish Broadcasting Company as a part of my Ph.D. project on “Design and Use of Learning Games”.