| Preamble |
This Chapter is part of the PolyCIVIS Handbook on Participatory Methods for Teaching about the Polycrisis in Higher Education. The objective of this Handbook is to serve as a reference resource for teaching about the polycrisis in Higher Education in a participatory manner, a need which has not only been foreseen by the PolyCIVIS project in its inception phase, but also confirmed and further substantiated in a number of meetings and workshops during the project’s lifetime.
This Handbook is not a coursebook to teach what the polycrisis is, but a methods book, to provide instruments for teaching about the polycrisis in a participatory manner. It is to be made available online as a multimedia live resource, presenting different participatory teaching methods for uptake by the Polycrisis-interested community in Higher Education, together with supporting materials such as method descriptions, references, examples and case studies.
The different methods proposed are presented in one chapter for each group of methods, which also includes, in the digital edition of this Handbook, a live survey to collect peer feedback from the community itself, on the usefulness and ease of use that community members (Higher Education tutors, students, researchers as well as practitioners) may themselves find specific methods to have within, and for, their own contexts and audiences.
| What do we mean by thin participation techniques? |
Embodied participation techniques use the body, movement, gesture, posture, role, spatial arrangement, performance, sensory experience and physical interaction as tools for learning. They include blindfolded games, bodystorming, Theatre of the Oppressed, Image Theatre, Forum Theatre, skits, role enactment, simulations, movement-based reflection and culinary bonding. In higher education, embodied participation helps students explore not only what people think about crises, but how crises are felt, navigated, resisted and negotiated. For teaching the polycrisis, these methods can make visible vulnerability, uncertainty, trust, power, dependency, coordination, exclusion and collective agency.
| Indicative starter sources for information about these methods |
| Additional sources of information about these methods |
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| Indicative participatory teaching scenarios for these methods |
Students physically arrange themselves as farmers, ports, energy providers, transport workers, retailers, governments, media and consumers. A facilitator introduces shocks: drought, fuel shortage, misinformation or border closure. Students move, freeze or re-route connections, making visible how disruption travels through bodies, spaces and institutions.
A small group performs a scene in which residents from a vulnerable neighbourhood are excluded from climate-adaptation planning. The audience becomes “spect-actors”: they stop the scene, replace characters and test alternative actions. The class reflects on power, voice, representation and institutional responsibility.
Students complete a simple group navigation task while some members are blindfolded, some have partial instructions and some hold contradictory information. The debrief connects the embodied experience to crisis governance: uncertainty, trust, communication asymmetry, dependency and the ethics of guiding others.
Groups perform two short scenes: one showing a failed emergency communication, and one showing an improved version. They must include language barriers, disabled access, misinformation, institutional mistrust and time pressure. Peers identify what changed between the two scenes.
Students prepare or share simple food-related artefacts, stories or recipes connected to food systems, displacement, climate, austerity or cultural memory. The activity becomes a structured dialogue on food insecurity, care, dignity, sustainability and the politics of everyday survival.
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