Role-playing institutional academic integrity policy-making: using researched perspectives to develop pedagogy

Abstract

This article describes research-based role-play on academic integrity. In the role-play, doctoral students negotiated the revision of an institutional integrity policy representing different groups of academics and students. On the one hand, role-play as a teaching method and learning activity demonstrated the difficulty of accommodating different perspectives; on the other, it showed the power and necessity of negotiation in matters that involve value judgments. The role-play is described in detail along with its underlying pedagogical foundations and its contextualisation in a doctoral summer school where it took place. The purpose of the article is to describe how academic integrity was approached through role-play and to discuss theoretical and pedagogical foundations of role-play in teaching academic integrity. Although the article does not describe empirical research on role-play as a teaching method, it demonstrates how role-play in teaching academic integrity was developed based on prior research on the topic.