Jason J. Howard Adventures in Reasoning

Annotation

Helping students think more critically, communicate ideas more effectively, and work more cooperatively with others are goals widely recognized as indispensable to a proper education. Adventures in Reasoning: Communal Inquiry Through Fantasy Role-Play provides middle school, high school, and even post-secondary teachers with a method to cultivate these crucial skill sets in a way that is engaging, academically rigorous, and also fun. The role-playing approach draws upon the pioneering notion of the community of inquiry as a vehicle for enhancing student learning and development through discussing philosophical concepts and issues. Students create characters that they then use to explore a rich fantasy world filled with practical and conceptual challenges specifically designed to enhance a wide range of cognitive and communication abilities. Drawing together the appeal of fantasy narratives with the rigor of communal inquiry, Adventures in Reasoning provides educators with a rich array of tools through which to engage students' interests, capture their curiosity, and cultivate crucial cognitive and social skills. Some additional key features of this book include:step-by-step instructions on how to implement fantasy-gaming in the classroomtips on how to assess students' critical and creative reasoning skillseasy to understand rules for fantasy role-playingdetailed adventure quests provided that target a wide array of skill setsoverview of the pedagogical benefits of introducing philosophy and communal inquiry to middle and high school studentslots of advice and suggestions on how to facilitate an effective community of inquiry and how to accommodate different class sizes and student abilitiesrecommendations on how to use fantasy role-playing as a type of service learning in college classrooms