Member of the Month: Jeremy Caddel

The Member of the Month feature periodically highlights our amazing membership and the things they’re doing. If you know someone who should be featured as the Member of the Month, email our Communications Minion and we’ll make it happen! September’s Member of the Month is Dr. Jeremy Caddel. 

What kind of work do you do?

Until recently, I was teaching International Relations, focusing on international law and US foreign policy. I taught undergrads and graduate students, along with some summer programs for middle school and high school. 

Why are you a NASAGA member?

The people! NASAGA brings in a wide range of people from different walks of life—education, corporate, government—who all have a passion for games. Sometimes I learn the most from someone who is coming to games for an entirely different purpose than I am. I come to games to teach, and specifically to use them to help students intuitively understand a complicated theory. It’s more engaging for them to play a few rounds of Prisoner's Dilemma than to use calculus to solve for an equilibrium. 

At NASAGA, I’ve met a lot of people who are doing games as facilitators in the private and public sector, whether it’s for training or leader development or a planning role as part of consulting. So it’s always interesting to hear from them. I also like to hear from game designers who are building games for those spaces, like a company that will use a game to train people in a Human Resources issue or some kind of technical issue they need to know for their job. It’s fantastic learning from people like that, who teach to different audiences. When I talk to people who have to reach a different audience, I often realize that I’m not reaching as many people as I thought. Learning from others is really helpful there.

What’s your favorite NASAGA memory?

There are too many to count, but I think attending my first conference in Bloomington, Indiana holds a special place. It felt like coming home. My colleagues were very supportive of my use of games in the classroom, but I was definitely in the minority. Bloomington was the first time I was in a space where everyone shared my interest and passion for games and learning. The conference game night was particularly great, because we were playing games and thinking about the game. We were exchanging those ideas at a metagame level as we were playing: Oh, this game mechanic would be really useful for this type of thing. I don’t know where else you can have those conversations other than the NASAGA conference.

NASAGA’s theme for the 2023 Conference is “Space at the Table.” What do you do in your professional practice to integrate diverse points of view?

After a few years of running role playing simulations in the classroom, I realized that students were invested in the game mechanics, but not giving much thought to the roles. And, even when they did think about the role they were playing, they were constrained by trying to be historically “accurate.” I wanted them to bring more of their own experience into the simulations, so I rewrote all of the sim roles to be working-level.  Instead of playing the Secretary of State, they now play a desk officer. This creates space in the simulation for them to interject their own ideas, since we rarely remember these lower level officials or have any idea about their backgrounds. 

Next, I devoted a class period to character building. Students create their character to fill the role in the simulation. The character may be very similar to the student who creates it or they may be entirely different. This gives students the agency to bring diverse points of view into the simulation. I give them license to add anything they want, and we specifically talk about aspects of identity like education, socio-economic background, ethnicity, religion and religious observance, sexual orientation, disabilities, and geography. In fact I often give them tables based on the U.S. Census, and they can roll a d100 to pick from them. Or they can just use the tables for ideas, rolling again if they don’t like the initial outcome.

Throughout the semester, they also are assigned reflection pieces in which they consider why their character took the actions that they did and how their character would feel about the outcomes. We discuss these in the debrief so that we don’t just consider the structural or political forces that shaped the outcomes, but also the way that the decision makers were influenced by their backgrounds and beliefs.

As a result of all of the above, I see a lot more engagement. I try to design my simulations so that grades are secondary, so they’re thinking more about participating  than their grade. That builds a different kind of engagement. Sometimes it has unexpected side effects: it should empower action, but they can be so invested in their character that they become risk averse and don’t want to risk losing them! I don’t know that it improves retention of material, but it definitely improves their depth of thinking and the quality of the discussions we have afterwards. It allows them to poke inside the topic and come up with insights that they wouldn’t have otherwise had.

Anything else?

NASAGA is diverse enough that you’re going to get a wider range of inputs than at a specialized disciplinary conference, like a political science conference. So it’s a great place to get bigger ideas. But it’s small enough that you will meet every other person at the conference and have a meaningful conversation with them before the conference is over. So come join us in St. Louis next month!