CONNECTING AND LEARNING THROUGH FANTASY LITERATURE & IMAGINATION

By Patrick Taylor

Year 6 Teacher – Primary School

The game of Dungeons & Dragons celebrated its 50th anniversary this year and is currently experiencing a new level of popularity and growth among young people. Combining elements of drama, improvisation, storytelling, map-making, board games, video games, fantasy literature, imagination, mathematics, and miniatures, ‘D&D’ or ‘DnD’ is an adventure waiting to happen. While the game has seen several iterations throughout its history, at its core, it involves role-playing a hero character in a world of monsters, battles, challenges, and dilemmas, using a combination of dice, rulebooks, and creativity to determine the outcomes of players’ decisions.

As I got to know the students and their interests, I founded the official D&D club at CGS Primary School, which has been running since last year. The game’s potential to bring joy, excitement, and connection to those involved has been exciting to facilitate and witness. Students as young as 8 and as old as 13 have been playing together, sharing moments of humour, agonising over disappointment, and finding exultation in equal measure.

While adventure and triumph are the primary goals, games like D&D come with a host of other beneficial outcomes, both personal and interpersonal, for young people. Each Wednesday after school, I witnessed students practising compromise, compassion, problem-solving, mediation, communication, organisation, self-control, mental mathematics, descriptive writing, public speaking, and patience. Between the gasps of astonishment, fearsome war cries, and hoots of laughter, you might hear students giving a detailed description of a palace environment they spent the previous week imagining, explaining to a novice how to use their character sheet, negotiating a point of rules contention, or inviting someone to share their ideas for the next stage of the story.

Perhaps the most profound outcome of the time we’ve spent exploring dungeons and fighting evil together is the connection forged between students across classes, genders, and year groups—barriers that can sometimes seem insurmountable to a primary school student.

As a teacher focused on providing engaging and challenging learning experiences, I would argue that the potential to bring people together is one of the many magic spells you might find in use on a Wednesday afternoon in the D&D club.