With the rapid digitalization of society, emotions are increasingly commodified, symbolized, and shared through digital practices. Furthermore, global climate change has led to the emergence of new psychological disorders and exacerbated pre-existing vulnerabilities in youth. Climate anxiety has been featured in a mental health crisis. The youth of today, especially those living in the global North, must grapple with the paradox of the societal demand for constant digital consumption and innovation, propelled by the market economy's unabated pursuit of growth, versus the moral imperative to foster planetary well-being, which requires transformative changes in energy and technology use. This paradox can exert a potent, sometimes paralyzing force. The affective toll is often obscured in the talks of cognitive load/dissonance and the popular well-being discourses in learning science such as grit and mindset. The disharmonies we may encounter when trying to integrate what we know and feel, what we think we should do, what we do, what we would want to do if we didn't have to worry about money, and what we would want to tell our kids or our future selves: how am I supposed to make sense of how to be in the world? 

Against the backdrop of medicalizing or psychologizing climate emotions which can be understood as both an appropriate response to climate injustice and valuable for moral functioning, we argue for a greater educational emphasis on contemplative practices that nurture holistic human development, such as dialogue, improvisation, and deep listening. To this end, and informed by critical pedagogy and phenomenology, we repurposed an educational game designed for teaching critical thinking based on philosophy for children (P4C) pedagogy, incorporating role-play and adapting it to the needs and queries of adolescents and young adults. The broader goal of this learning activity is to foster a critical stance towards digital sustainability, and the intermediary goal is to let learners exercise their perspective-taking in an engaging and stimulating peer talk setting.

The design work is conducted as part of my doctoral thesis within the interdisciplinary learning sciences, with co-supervision in philosophy and affective science. The affective experiences that I investigate as part of my thesis are situated in the larger context of ecological, social, digital economic, and sustainable transitions across institutions in western Europe. By utilizing conceptual frameworks from disciplines that are relatively underrepresented in affective science, I propose to join two well-debated, non-essentialist theories of emotions — the constructed theory of emotions (Barrett, 2017) and the enactive, agency-based accounts (Varela et al, 1992, Colombetti, 2014) — in a framework of emotional capabilities development. We tentatively define having emotional capabilities as “being able and willing to maintain or improve relevant practices for one’s inner development in relationship with others and the world”.

During the design, I have either implicitly or explicitly borrowed from several frameworks, namely from Nussbaum’s capabilities approach for human development, critical pedagogy, contemplative practices, and recent attempts to integrate the goal of human flourishing in education and science (Nussbaum, 2009; Jordan et al., 2021; De Ruyter et al., 2020; Schumann et al., 2022). The practice framework is deliberately interventionist. It is derived from the design, observations, and reflections on a learning activity that embeds diverse values and reflective inquiry practices within an intricate mesh of character narratives that describe character actions, goals, and positions on (environmental, social, and economic) sustainability. In this presentation, I will report on the design, data analysis, and lessons learned from our first cycle of DBR, which raises questions regarding the content features and configurations that support the potential mediating processes involved in acquiring some of the transformative capacities, as described in Wamsler (2021)’s work.

Methodology: I employed the signature meta-method of learning science, design-based research (DBR). According to Wang and Hannafin (2005), DBR is a "systematic but flexible methodology aimed to improve educational practices through iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation, based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners in real-world settings, and leading to contextually-sensitive design principles and theories". Participants: Three gameplay sessions were attended by a total of 14 student volunteers (Group 1: n=6, Group 2: n=4, and Group 3: n=4),with each session lasting an average of 90 mins (range = 85 - 95). Participants are all young adults aged between 18 and 25 years. They were all EPFL undergraduate or master’s students. Each group represented a diverse array of cultural backgrounds. At least half of each group consists of individuals who were already acquainted with one another. Procedure: We held three gameplay sessions. The session began with a guided discovery of game components and objectives. Each group played the game for three rounds, each lasting approximately 20 minutes. Each round contains a discovery phase, the dialogue phase, and a collective debrief. Instructions and roles were clearly defined at the outset, and the facilitator (myself) was present to guide the process. Data Collection: Video and audio data were collected using HD camera and Zoom video recording to capture the gameplay sessions. All recordings were manually transcribed and annotated, accounting for verbal interactions and non-verbal expressions. In total, the transcripts consisted of 26,436 words. Data Analysis: I followed a systematic coding strategy informed by the reflexive thematic analysis (TA) method (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Methodological considerations: Analyzing observational data for intermediate outcomes presents significant challenges. One important question we grapple with is: What are the tangible signs of successful perspective-taking in this context? As my interests lie in both the simulative "matching" of "an imagined other" and the improvised "performing" and "interacting with" aspects of perspective-taking, encompassing the dual aspects of semantic understanding and expressions of standpoint on a proposition, and the enacted experiences of performing and imagining oneself in an "as if" scenario. Participants were informed that successful role-play doesn’t require an exact match between the character’s narrative and the player’s enactment. This means that when analyzing the data for perspective-taking-related processes, I adopted a charitable interpretation, accounting for players’ flexible interpretations of their characters.

Rooted in an enactive approach to social cognition, we explored the breadth and depth of perspective-taking within a gameplay context. The qualitative analysis allowed us to examine the depth and breadth of perspective-taking as enacted in our game-based intervention. The results shed light on the complex nature of perspective-taking in dialogue board gameplay, highlighting the role of both individual and interactive factors in players’ experiences. Moreover, we see how players are able to leap beyond their immediate circumstances and proactively seek out perspectives beyond those of their characters and of their dialogue partners through (1) Perspective-taking with people living in a different time (e.g. the pre-digital era); (2) Perspective-taking with people living in a different geographical location; (3) Perspective-taking with beings of different biological species. In temporal perspective-taking, players considered both past and future epochs. This observation expands the range of strategies for developing ESD competencies, as current ESD literature mainly focuses on future-oriented thinking. Geographical perspective-taking may lead to an understanding of the experiences and viewpoints of individuals living in diverse cultural contexts, fostering an appreciation of cultural embodiment. Biological perspective-taking pushed the participants to advocate for the voiceless, challenging anthropocentric biases and fostering empathy towards non-human species. The occurrence of these forms of perspective-taking within the dialogue suggests that the game effectively exercises players’ narrative imagination and promotes critical reflection. This can lead to a greater understanding of the complex and diverse social dynamics that exist globally and across different species.

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