Development of the European Roleplay Approach Erasmus Project

Project Title

Development of the European Roleplay Approach

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Creativity and culture; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy)

Project Summary

Project DERA (Development of the European Roleplay Approach) aims to create book that teaches youth workers throughout Europe how to use the innovative ERA (European Roleplay Approach) to best serve the youths with whom they work and how to design games to best fit their learners. Even though a certain therapeutic model of roleplaying has been used before in youth work, where the participants are given specific defined real life roles and the scenarios are short term, these are not fun and engaging games, but obvious therapeutic and overt learning exercises. While there is no question of the value of this type of roleplay in certain situations, it can be difficult to get youths to voluntarily engage in the activity since it’s a form of work and not fun.

ERA, on the other hand, is firmly rooted in gaming and play. It uses tabletop hobby roleplaying that many people voluntarily play in their leisure time. With ERA the youths are given tools to create their own hero, a persona that they can feel connected to and invested in, and those heroes are then put into challenges and situations that are both fun and engaging while still being learning opportunities at the same time. The approach has already been successfully used in youth work to help at-risk youths learn topics such as language, culture, and ethics, to just name a few. But till now it has only been used on a relatively small scale.

The network of partners has been very active in using ERA in European youth events with amazing results. For instance, we have seen several youths with severe social anxiety who didn’t say a word to strangers take on leadership roles and run games for others. Creating and developing ERA has been done by volunteers and since we have all focused on running the events for youths we never had time to take the approach to a level at which it could be passed on to others even though there is a lot of interest from organizations that have seen our results. For this reason we have been encouraged to launch the DERA project and make the implicit knowledge we have gathered during the last years explicit and accessible to a wider group of youth workers and teachers.

Without the right experience it is not so easy to create the right learning scenarios scenarios that are also engaging and fun. Therefore the objective of the project DERA is the creation of a book that can teach youth workers and youth centers how to use the approach and how to customize the games to the issues that are most important to the youths they serve. A book allows the approach to reach a wide audience of youth workers. Youth workers will not only understand how to use the European Roleplay Approach, they will also be able to master it and have the confidence to try it out on their own. At the same time we want to make the book fun, and we specifically encourage youths to read it as well and take advantage of role-playing to train a variety of their skills on their own.

The long term benefit is an additional, interesting, and most of all fun tool that can be added to the youth work tool kit for helping disadvantaged youths. The approach can be used EU-wide and will be made available online as an ebook for free.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 51048,5 Eur

Project Coordinator

Royal Rangers Belgium & Country: BE

Project Partners

• Pakkhús Ungmennahús
• Dragon Legion e. V.
• Estonian Promising Youth Creative Group