Rosie: That sounds fantastic. It would be great if you could actually see perhaps some of the resources that you have used during the class. 

00:10 

Florence: I will just show you those now. 

So this is the sort of like passport. So we called the game "Italian Passport" and this is, in a game like Dungeons and Dragons you have a character sheet which sort of explains your character as an elf and an archer or whatever, and it has all of their statistics but in this we use the character sheet to kind of keep some of the vocab that people have learned and information about their character. So this is sort of the back side and there's a quick section about what this passport is and sort of how the game works but again it's not exactly strict rules and this is something I just sort of threw together in Word in like an hour or two.

00:55 

There's some information here about the dice so there's sometimes people will be required to roll the dice and we've got zero to three: whatever you're doing went very very wrong,  four to eight: bravo you succeeded in your task,  nine: mama mia, couldn't have possibly gone better you aced the task and there's a hot steaming pizza pie waiting for you back home.  

01:14 

So a lot of the, I think, we very much leaned into stereotypes a little bit.

Eleanor: We did!

Florence: which you know may not be the best but I thought it, figured it would be, you know...

Eleanor: It was fun yeah and it was also because it was they were coming wanting to learn Italian and so like I think you kind of obviously like nationalist national stereotypes can sometimes be harmful but I think sometimes they're in like good nature.

Florence: yeah 

Eleanor: yeah 

Florence: and then here is sort of the their passport that they would fill out with their name and where they're from and then some of the other vocab that they would have been learning during their lessons right?

Eleanor: yeah, and so the "profession incapacità" which is then like the job that they would be doing or the role that they would be playing and then the various skills that they would have as that character, that is something that we like pre-planned and and so they wouldn't have to come up with that entirely themselves but then all of this stuff they could just entirely make up so they could call it what they wanted and they had great fun picking an Italian name.  Where they were living: they could make that up.  Birthday: they could make that up, and this worked quite well because over the course of learning I was like oh you don't have to worry about that we'll kind of work out the vocabulary for colours later on and so then it was quite helpful to have this passport to come back to, to kind of like fill little bits in about the character and meant that they can then build their kind of alter ego.  

02:46 

Florence: So I will try to bring up, is this, are you able to see this now? Or is it still on the passport? okay

Baerbel: No, it's still on the passport.

Florence: Okay I will just try and change that. I'll just stop and then start again.

So these are some of the characters that El mentioned.  And again I think each player just  rolled like the 10-sided dice and then they got given a different stereotypical Italian identity. 

03:22 

Eleanor: It was quite cute as well because, as I say, like when I first introduced it to them I was a little bit uncertain about how much they would kind of buy into it like, "What is this she's showing us?"  But it was really cute when they would roll the dice and say they got would get like you know the Terrone, the southern peasant, "oh god,no I don't want to play them" and then they'd like roll again to get another one so they were really into the idea of playing a character.

Florence: And as I said before, like less rules is probably helpful for people feeling less intimidated, but each of these characters have a couple of points about like their attributes of how they behave which I think gives people some cues if they are role-playing so if you know someone was the Opera Diva, being wealthy and attractive, it's two things that you can easily use to be like, "I'm not going to be myself in this situation: I'm going to be this imaginary Opera Diva" and so they are sort of little pointers to get people going in the role-playing. 

04:19 

Baerbel: Can I just ask here, so how did people choose?  So they rolled a dice and if they didn't like the the character then they would be allowed to basically choose?

Eleanor: Yeah, I just let them roll again, just to kind of keep that element of chance in, but if there was one that they were particularly like if they say they really really wanted to play the Tour Guide, I would just be like,  "Sure you know yeah, play the Tour Guide".  

04:43 

Florence: I remember you saying in particular that there is the Pope on there and that there was one person who played the Pope who very much, it let him come out of his shell?

Eleanor: Yeah, there was a lot, my class was a lot of  very very sociable chatty women who really loved the opportunity of the Italian class as a kind of chance to catch up, as well. But then there was also one guy who was really shy and kind of didn't really get along with the gossip of the women as much.  He ended up playing the pope and he would like just really come out of his shell.  He was kind of like using the Italian all the time. He was making little jokes.  He was really playing in character so it really did work for kind of bringing him out a little bit more.

05:25 

Florence: And then the final piece I will show you is the sort of campaign or mystery itself.  So I wrote this just for El to have, and it contains some sort of establishing text that she would read out to set the scene so: It's a lovely day in the city of Rome, birds are singing, the sun is shining.  And then introduces the problem that a pizza chef has lost his family recipe and he feels he can no longer make his famous pizza anymore.  And then, again, very stereotypical but it contains some sort of pointers for El who was running the game.  So there were, we planned different sort of rooms in the cafe and  different things that the people could do and so we just tried to prepare for different eventualities of what the players would want to do.  But there's always going to be things that you can't prepare for, so like we said that there was a safe that was robbed in the basement and like there was no money taken so you could say there was no 

06:26 

Eleanor: like robbery or something.

Florence: Yeah yeah but then like immediately as soon as El told the players that the recipe had been stolen one of them just said, "Oh I'll just google a pizza recipe for you".  So like I think no matter how much preparation you do and things you try to think of there will always be someone the minute you start playing a game who thinks there's something completely new that you'd never would have predicted.  And so I think it's less about being like, "This is my narrative that I'm going to tell you" and sticking to that,  and just having fun and role-playing and responding to what your participants are doing? 

07:00 

Eleanor: It was quite nice in that sense because it did put a like teacher and learner on a slightly same level as well in a sense?  Like obviously I knew more Italian but like I was still had to kind of like role-play all of these characters in the story in the same way that they were role-playing their characters.  So when I was being like Marco and then, I can't remember who it was said, "I'll google it" and then I was like, "oh okay right what am I going to do", and then it had to be then very much, "No, it's the family recipe" and so it was a lot more collaborative learning in that sense which was really nice. 

07:33 

Florence: Yeah I think obviously we've you know come up with a game and a campaign the story and rules and stuff like that,  but I feel like you could do this on a much smaller scale and it would still work really well like maybe having some of the premise of being like, "Oh you are Italian characters" or something like that, helps people get into the spirit?  But you could very much do a role play like this without the passport or the rules.

07:53 

Eleanor: I think it's quite nice to have like the overarching story because people use like obviously role-playing language lessons quite a lot like when you're going to the post office like buy a stamp and but it's quite nice I think that with this one it's so much more open and they could have been like this like right they say because it came sorry it came out that they had to like track the thief to Venice and then work out how they were going to do it but they could have been like no we're not going to do that at all we're going to try and like go to the pizza chef's.  We're going to try and find his Nonna we're going to try and like get her to write the recipe as well and so it gave them a lot more freedom and choice I think.