Playing Spent!: FGWC Experiences of Poverty Simulation Games

Abstract

First-generation and working-class (FGWC) students bring a different set of life experiences to the classroom than students of privilege. As an instructor from an FGWC background, I use the poverty simulation game Spent! to make economic stratification understandable to students who have led lives of economic privilege and bring FGWC representation to the classroom in a way that honors their unique cultural capital. Despite a tendency toward consciousness raising for students of privilege, poverty simulation can still be a liberatory learning exercise for FGWC students when the cultural capital they bring to the classroom from their lived experience is valued and honored during the activity rather than objectified and subordinated. During the activity, as privileged students express shock at the realities of living paycheck to paycheck, FGWC students confidently share their situated knowledge of poverty. Building on prior assessments of the value of simulation games in the classroom, this article expands this knowledge by specifically looking at the experiences of FGWC students in addition to their more privileged peers in the context of Spent!

Improving attitudes toward poverty and attitudes toward interprofessional collaboration through online interprofessional synchronous poverty simulation: A mixed methods comparison study

“…[11,12] Poverty simulations have demonstrated improved participant attitudes toward poverty in many fields, including pharmacy, nursing, social work, physical therapy, criminal justice, and education. [13][14][15][16][17] The asynchronous online poverty simulation SPENT has demonstrated improved attitudes toward poverty, [18][19][20][21] but no reports have been located that also evaluated SPENT as an interprofessional activity. In a pooled analysis of poverty simulations, Taylor [22] found that participants reported increased self-efficacy and intentions related to interprofessional collaboration pre-to post-simulation.…”