Learning to Become Citizens by Enacting Governorship in the Statecraft Curriculum: An Evaluation of Learning Outcomes

Citizenship education is important in developing nations, where establishing a vital sense of statehood, belonging, and common purpose amongst citizens presents political leaders with significant challenges. This paper examines the enactment of an innovative citizenship education learning program based on the Statecraft X curriculum. The authors hold that it is essential for student learning to be engaged in and studied performatively, in the everyday context of students’ situated action and participation in discursive practices. Consequently, the curriculum involves school students using a 24/7 mobile learning game played on Apple iPhones—Statecraft X—to enact governorship in the game world Velar. In addition, students construct their ideal, but fictional, world Bellalonia via the “play of imagination” as part of a Play-between-Worlds curriculum model. Empirical findings show that (a) dispositional shifts on several values and beliefs related to governance and citizenship were significantly “better” for intervention group students compared with control group students, and (b) intervention group students demonstrated significantly improved learning gains, compared with control group students, in respect of a summative essay writing task on governance and citizenship, evaluated on the criteria of relevance, perspective, and voice. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-4018-4.ch005