Experiencing the European Union

Learning how EU negotiations work through simulation games

Marco Brunazzo, Pierpaolo Settembri

• Publisher: Rubbettino Editore
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9788849838671
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Staatliches Rechnungswesen

The EU is a complex political and institutional machine, with distinct procedures, language and codes. Its functioning is based on negotiations among a variety of actors at different levels (local, regional, national, supranational, inter-institutional, intra-institutional, etc.) as well as in informal and non-legislative contexts. For this reason, the EU can be difficult to understand. Negotiation roleplaying simulations can shed light on the genuine dynamics of the system and are thus becoming an essential element in teaching and training on EU matters. This book is an introduction and a guide to the EU decision-making process and its institutional settings, an essential tool for effective negotiators in the European arena, and an instrument for teachers at any level offering a series of suggestions on how to design successful simulation games.

Part I

SIMULATIONS AND EU NEGOTIATIONS IN CONTEXT

Chapter 1

Simulations

Simulations have acquired prominence in contemporary teaching, and especially in international relations. Suffice it to consider the indexes of the leading journals on contemporary politics, teaching, and the discipline of political science¹ to see how extensive the use of simulation games is, and how complex and structured they have become. But what are the pedagogical and educational foundations of simulations?

For years (if not for centuries), educational psychologists and, more in general, teachers have sought the best teaching method. To date, it has not been clear what the factors are that encourage students to learn: exposed to the same stimuli, as they occur in the same class, students learn at different paces and retain different notions. What makes the difference? The answer is still unclear. Nevertheless, raising the question has triggered rather fruitful discussions.

Student-centred approaches

Scholars have focused broadly on two main pedagogical approaches: the “traditional instruction” and the “student-centred” ones (Jonassen and Land 2000). These approaches have been compared and contrasted in va rious respects (Table 1).

Table 1 - Traditional instruction vs. Student-Centred Learning Environments

Traditional Instruction

Student-Centred Learning Environments

transmission, acquisition mastery, performance external reality dualism, absolutism abstract, symbolic individually interpreted mind-centred directed reductionistic individual idealist, rational encoding, retention, retrieval internal, mental receptive, reproductive symbolic reasoning psychology laboratory theoretical central processing architecture objective, modellable symbol processor disembodied conceptual, memorial atomistic, decomposable independent possessed objective, stable, fixed well-structured decontextualised compliant

interpretation, construction meaning making internal reality cultural relativism, perspectival relativism contextualised, authentic, experiential socially negotiated, co-constructed community-based, culturally mediated intentional complex, self-organising collaborative pragmatist articulation and reflection social constructive situated learning anthropology, sociology, ethnography in situ everyday distributed architecture experiential, interpretative symbol builder experiential perceptual gestalt emergent distributed subjective, contextualised, fluid ill-structured embedded in experience self-regulated

Source: Jonassen and Land 2000, viii.

The second approach has recently been so widely used that it has become a sort of “mantra”: students actively take part in a learning process that is “constructive, cumulative, self-regulated, goal-oriented situated, collaborative, and individually different” (De Corte 2000, 254). According to Sands and Shelton (2010, 133), there is today “a general acceptance of more effective teaching as interactive Activities Methodologies than standard Didactic instruction”.

The success of the student-centred approach is related to the success that constructivist ideas have achieved in recent years. Constructivism argues that the apprentice should be the protagonist of her² learning, in the sense that it must be actively constructed by the former.

There are three essential characteristics of constructivism in education:

1) Knowledge is the result of an ongoing process of interpreting the world by the learner and, as such, is never final; Brown et al. (1989, 33) define this first feature as follows: a concept, for example, will continually evolve with each new occasion of use, because new situations, negotiations, and activities inevitably recast it in a new, more densely textured form. So a concept, like the meaning of a word, is always under construction (ibidem).

2) Knowledge is derived from the context: we learn something when we need it or when we think we may need it in the future. In any case, knowledge means knowing how to solve problems.

3) In the learning process, collaboration and the negotiation of meanings play a fundamental role. A student learns if she interacts with colleagues and the teacher. In other words, there is a cultural (or social) dimension in knowledge: the activities of a domain are framed by its culture.Their meaning and purpose are socially constructed through negotiations among present and past members. Activities thus cohere in a way that is, in theory if not always in practice, accessible to members who move within the social framework. These coherent, meaningful, and purposeful activities are authentic, according to the definition of the term we use here (ibidem, 34).

Today, the growing availability of information and the complexity of the problems to address require universities not only to furnish students with specific skills necessary to acquaint them with debates and issues in specific disciplines; they are also required to transmit the meta-skills (the ability to do research, the ability to organise meetings, the ability to speak in public, the ability to defend a position through reasoning) that can be applied in diverse environments (at school, but also – and above all – at work). For these reasons, the second approach is also called “competence-based”.

It has thus become urgent to know how to answer a question that students ask themselves whenever they face a course whose purpose is unclear: “Why do I need to know this? How can it be useful for me?”. Students often do not regard knowledge as something that can help them solve problems, but rather as a sterile repetition of concepts whose purpose remains mysterious. This is not new: it was 1929 when Whitehead coined the term “inert knowledge” to refer to an abstract knowledge that students cannot use on practical things.

This change entails the need to identify teaching methods that respond better to the new requirements. But what has caused this situation? Why are universities required to supply these new skills? The main reason is, probably, the emergence of a global knowledge society: “this era – the ‘information age’ – can be characterised by an ‘infinite, dynamic and changing mass of information’ (Dochy and McDowell 1997, 280) and requires cognitive, meta-cognitive, and social competencies of its citizens. Students need to achieve not only a sound base of discipline specific knowledge and skills but also a number of ‘higher order’ skills and attitudes. In this way, students should become able to cope with ever-changing environments and abstract and complex work processes” (Bursens and Van Loon 2007, 2). For examples of the possible forms that the student-centered approach may take, see the table 2.

Table 2 - The different forms of the student-centered approach

Messing around	Students are provided with equipment or materials and encouraged to do whatever they feel like doing. Although learning occurs in such an activity – as it does in any deliberate activity – there is likely to be no objectification of knowledge, except possibly by the teacher.
Hands-on learning or guided discovery	Students receive guidance on what to do, often with the aim of discovering some specific mathematical or scientific principle.
Learning through problem solving	Students are engaged collaboratively in some problematic problem solving task that might be anything from solving a complicated mathematical problem to conducting an environmental impact study.
Curiosity-driven inquiry	Driven by their own curiosity, perhaps stimulated by challenging questions from the teacher, students gather information from reading, observation, or empirical research in an effort to satisfy their curiosity and answer their questions.
Theory improvement	Inquiry begins with students’ questions and puzzlements, but the focus is on students proposing initial theories (rectius “conjectures”). The focus of inquiry and discussion then becomes improvement of these theories. Pursuit of information may go on as much as in the previous approach, but the information obtained is applied to theory improvement and its relevance is judged in that context.

Source: Bereiter and Scardamalia (1996)

In light of these changes Grabinger and Dunlap (1995, 10) have suggested the creation of so-called Rich Environments for Active Learning (REALs). REALs are comprehensive instructional systems that evolve from and are consistent with constructivist philosophies and theories; promote study and investigation within authentic (i.e. realistic, meaningful, relevant, complex, and information-rich) contexts; encourage the growth of student responsibility, initiative, decision-making and intentional learning; cultivate an atmosphere of knowledge-building learning communities that utilise collaborative learning among students and teachers; utilise dynamic, interdisciplinary, generative learning activities that promote high-level thinking processes (i.e. analysis, synthesis, problem-solving, experimentation, creativity, and examination of topics from multiple perspectives) to help students integrate new knowledge with old knowledge and thereby create rich and complex knowledge structures; and, assess student progress in content and learning-to-learn through realistic tasks and performances (Table 3).

Table 3 - Five specific attributes of REALs

1. Student responsibility and initiative	Students are invited to understand that their training is an end and not a random accident. This awareness can be achieved only through the active involvement of the student in teaching. The student must learn to learn and not only to accumulate knowledge. But how? By letting students decide what they want to learn, by facilitating a process of reflection about themselves and their actions, by making them learn the meta-knowledge, that is, by making them reflect on what they know, what they do not know and on the timing of learning, by encouraging mutual learning (group work, discussions on texts, etc.).
2. Generative learning	The student is called upon to solve problems and learn through experience. The teacher does not dispense knowledge but, rather, mediates and enables the students to achieve their objectives. How? Through a real apprenticeship, in which the students are asked to do things as they did in the old artisan shops or painting schools.
3. Authentic learning contexts	The more authentic the context, the more the student is forced to do well. “Authentic” means as close as possible to what the student will encounter in the real world.
4. Authentic assessment strategies	The evaluation should concern not only the knowledge that the student has accumulated, but also meta-knowledge developed and its critical and organisational capacity.
5. Cooperative support	Student should feel responsible for their learning and for the learning of others. They know that the better the quality of their work and that of others, the better their preparation.

Source: adapted from Grabinger and Dunlap (1995).

REALs are part of the Problem-based learning (PBL), which is “the learning that results from the process of working toward the understanding or resolution of a problem” (Barrows and Tamblyn 1980, 18). PBL found initial acceptance in the medical field and has grown to become a major learning system for a number of medical, law and business schools.

It might rightly be argued that this is nothing new. Socrates, for example, often used questions and problems to teach his students, and invented maieutics for the purpose. Rousseau arg...