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The Society for Research into Higher Education

Tag Archives: educational dialogue


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Snakes and Ladders: gamifying educational research to enhance practice

by Lucy Panesar

I write here about an example of higher education research that has been gamified to enhance inclusive practices at the University of Kent. The original game of Snakes and Ladders had its origins in a ritual Indian game of knowledge, evolving to entertainment, and now again to education.

Student Success Snakes and Ladders is a University of Kent staff development game I created with research associate Dr Yetunde Kolajo in 2024, to support colleagues to understand student barriers and identify appropriate solutions. It takes the classic Snakes and Ladders board game and adds cards explaining the reason for a student downfall or advancement. These scenarios were derived from longitudinal research by Hensby, Adewumi and Kolajo (2024) that tracked the higher education journey of 25 students in receipt of the Academic Excellence Scholarship (AES) at Kent. The AES research reveals factors influencing student retention, continuation and attainment along with associated institutional supports.

We adapted Snakes and Ladders to gamify the AES research findings in a way that develops inclusive student support practices. Our version of the game rests on principles of “serious play” (Rieber et al, 1998), in the way that it supports players to understand and respond to the real lives of students with care, respect and a sense of collective responsibility. The classic Snakes and Ladders game we’ve adapted has a rich history in both entertainment and educational contexts, and this encouraged us to adapt it for our purposes.

We have run Student Success Snakes and Ladders with over 200 colleagues now. When we ask who’s played Snakes and Ladders before, nearly everyone says yes, whatever their background, due to the game’s international popularity. And like many popular traditions in British culture, the game made its way to the UK via British colonialism. As a half-Indian Brit, it was a pleasure but no surprise to learn from Wikipedia that Snakes and Ladders originated in ancient India as Moksha Patam and came over to the UK in the 1890s.

The image is a Jain version of Snakes and Ladders called Jnana Bazi or Gyan Bazi from India, 19th century, Gouache on cloth (Wikicommons).

Mehta (cited in Aitken, 2015) explains: “Just as the board game of chess was designed to teach the strategies of war, so Snakes and Ladders was played ritually as Gyanbaji, the Game of Knowledge, a meditation on humanity’s progress toward liberation.” Topsfield (2006) explains how variants have been found across Jain, Hindu and Sufi Muslim sects in India and describes how: “… pilgrim-like, each player progresses fitfully from states of vice, illusion, karmic impediment, or inferior birth at the base of the playing area to ever higher states of virtue, spiritual advancement, the heavenly realms, and (in the ultimate, winning square) liberation (mokṣa) or union with the supreme deity.”

This paints quite a different picture to the fun game of chance most of us played as children. Topsfield outlines how the game developed from its Indian spiritual origins into a more moralistic English children’s game in the late 1800s and then into the modern simplified derivatives familiar to us now.

While the game is still played mainly for fun, it has continued to serve educational purposes across the globe. Snakes and Ladders is used to teach Jawai script in Malaysian primary schools (Shitiq and Mahmud, 2010); to promote moral education learning systems in Nigeria (Ibam et al, 2018); for Covid awareness training (Ariessanti et al, 2020), sex education (Ahmad et al, 2021) and to promote healthy eating in Indonesia (Thaha et al, 2022). An article on Snakes and Ladders being used for anatomy training in Iran concludes that the method “can excite the students, create landmarks for remembering memorizing methods and can improve their team work” (Golchai et al, 2012). In the UK, Snakes and Ladders has been used to facilitate Dignity in Care training by Caerphilly Council (2024).

Inspired by these other examples of ‘serious play’ (Rieber et al, 1998), Yetunde and I adapted the game to develop inclusive student support practices at Kent. We bought existing copies of the board game and added bespoke snake and ladder cards, each with different scenarios from the AES research. When players fall on a snake or ladder, they read a corresponding card to understand the scenario leading to that advance or decline.

Before sliding down any snakes, players can use a blank “Catch” card to propose an intervention to mitigate the snake and allow the student to stay put. This element prompts colleagues to collaborate to enhance inclusive and equitable practices, reinforcing values inscribed in the Advance HE Professional Standards (2023). If players fall on a yellow square, they can pick up a “Campus” card to reveal and discuss an aspect of campus life in relation to student success.

Student Success Snakes and Ladders has been well received by Kent staff, including academics, and has proved to be an effective way of using institutional research to enhance student support practices. Our next step is to embed the game within mandatory training for academic and support staff across the university, to ensure that more students are supported to avoid slippery snakes along their higher education journey.

Dr Lucy Panesar is a UK-based educator and educational developer focused on the development of inclusive and equitable higher education practices. Her first teaching role was at the University for the Creative Arts and her first educational development role was at the University of the Arts London, where she led various projects promoting curriculum decolonization. Since 2022, she has been a Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Kent, supporting academic and curriculum development across the disciplines.


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Talking the talk: language for learning in higher education

by Estefania Gamarra, Marion Heron, Lewis Baker and Harriet Tenenbaum

Do you remember when you started university, and you were expected to use a whole new language? We don’t just mean new nomenclature such as ‘seminars’ or ‘tutorials’, but language that can help you make a clear argument or disagree politely with a classmate. This language, or educational dialogue, and in particular disagreeing politely, is critical to be an engaged citizen in a healthy democracy, without otherwise descending into unhealthy practices such as ‘cancel culture’ as recently highlighted in the media. In this blog post, we argue that universities have a responsibility not only to teach students how to talk in an academic context, but also for this teaching to be discipline-specific and embedded in the disciplinary study where possible.

There is a long-held misperception that all students who start university are able to talk the talk of the university, that is, they have the language skills, the terminology, and the confidence to articulate their opinions from their first day. This is just simply not true for many undergraduate students. Having English as a first language is also not necessarily an advantage. Bourdieu et al (1994, p8) said, “academic language… is no one’s mother tongue, not even that of children of the cultivated classes”.

What do we mean by language here? We have drawn on the pedagogy and research from compulsory school education, namely the work of scholars at Cambridge University. Their work on educational dialogue has been successfully incorporated into school teaching with impressive results. Educational dialogue here refers to communicative acts such as agreeing, disagreeing, reasoning and expressing ideas. Research in school settings has shown that encouraging such dialogue can boost academic attainment. One study highlighted the relationship between elaborating on ideas and attainment in reading, spelling, punctuation and grammar. Despite this compelling evidence, similar strategies have been underexplored in higher education.

In our university classrooms, we hear students say things such as: ‘I know the answer, but don’t know how to phrase it’ and ‘I need to learn how to express my answer like that’. So, if students are themselves noticing a need for academic language, why are we so behind in the higher education context? And more importantly, what language do these students need? Do they all need the same academic language to confidently talk the talk? This is exemplified by the dialogue below between two engineering students working on answering multiple-choice questions together, an excerpt from our forthcoming research:

Student A:  Yeah, listen, we need to be able when we say “force”, to say why.  

Student B:  Yeah, to flip it.  

Student A:  Because we were right, like, C is incorrect, but we don’t say why it is not incorrect.  

Student B:  I don’t know how to word it, you know.

In our current research project, supported by a Nuffield Foundation grant, we explore whether pairs of Foundation Year students across Engineering, Psychology and Bioscience, engaging in discipline-specific multiple-choice questions, can learn to develop these academic language skills and the extent to which they can do this in an academic year-long intervention programme.

Our early findings indicate that while students are capable of using academic language, the forms they adopt vary by discipline. For example, consider one of the most basic interactions in academic discussions – giving and asking for reasons. Typically, the default marker for requesting justification is “why?”. The following extract from a psychology discussion illustrates this:

Student A:  Why do you think that is?

Student B:  Because, uh, if you got negative emotion, you know, so that is not called positive psychology. Yep, yeah, so I’m thinking about understanding like how to prevent negative emotions.

In contrast, in science courses such as biology or engineering, it was more common to use “how?” rather than “why?” when asking for reasoning. Consider this extract from an engineering discussion:

Student A:  Yes. Then the same as D.

Student B:  D? How?

Student A:  And then it’s…

Student B:  Oh.

Student A:  And this is…

Student B:  So the arrow goes this way…

Student A:  So then P goes this way…

Here, Student B not only asks for the reasoning by using “how?”, but the response unfolds as a sequence of steps outlining the reasoning process. This example also highlights another subject-specific difference: while psychology students typically expand on each other’s arguments or examples, engineering students more frequently build on each other’s equations, often with the assistance of pen and paper.

So, based on these snippets of authentic student dialogues, let’s return to the question posed at the beginning. Yes, all students can and do need to learn academic language to talk to each other and develop understanding, but the type of language depends on the discipline. Disciplinary differences can be seen in the way students build on each other’s ideas (eg long turns, short turns) as well as the words and phrases used. The evidence from our project shows this.

We argue that learning to talk the language of higher education should not be considered a prerequisite but instead, should be an essential feature of the higher education curriculum embedded within disciplinary studies.

Why is this important? Integrating academic language training into the curriculum can enhance students’ academic confidence, foster a stronger sense of belonging, and ultimately improve retention rates. In a post‐COVID world, where student engagement is waning, this conversation‐based approach may also help rebuild the social and collaborative fabric of university life.

Moreover, the skills developed through such training are highly transferable beyond academia. Students acquire essential discussion and teamwork abilities that prove invaluable in their future careers. It is important to emphasise that developing these skills requires deliberate training; we must not assume that students will acquire them without practice and guidance.

Although students may already use discipline‐specific language, targeted training helps them become accustomed to engaging in – and, more importantly, listening to – disagreement. These conversational practices become part of their repertoires, enabling them to generalize these skills across various contexts. As noted earlier, we must all learn to engage in constructive disagreement to counteract cancel culture. While the manner of such discourse may vary by discipline, developing these skills is essential for active participation in a healthy, thriving democracy.

Estefania Gamarra Burga is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Surrey. Her research interests include educational dialogue, discourse analysis, gender, and spatial cognition in STEM and higher education.

Marion Heron is Associate Professor of Educational Linguistics in the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey. She supervises doctoral students on topics in the field of applied linguistics and higher education. She researches in the areas of language and education, with a particular interest in classroom discourse, genre and doctoral education.

Lewis Baker is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences and a Chartered Science Teacher. His research interests include teaching pedagogy and science education, often within a foundation year context.

Harriet Tenenbaum is Professor of Social and Developmental Psychology. Her research focuses on social justice in young people, everyday conversations, and teaching and learning across the lifespan.