The Poverty Game as a Teaching Tool

The following three-part discussion of a role-playing activity called the
Poverty Game took place on WMST-L in October and November, 1999.  A detailed
description of the activity appears at the start of Part 2.  See also a related
discussion from 2005, Resources for Teaching about Poverty.  For additional
WMST-L files now available on the Web, see the WMST-L File Collection.

PAGE 1 OF 3

I just came across a brief description of something called the Poverty Game,
a role-playing activity devised by women in British Columbia.  Game players
assume the identity of women on welfare and have to figure out how to make
it through a particular period of time and complete a number of tasks.  Does
anyone have any more information on this game?  I'd like to use it as a
class activity.

Thanks in advance!

Krista Scott-Dixon

-------------------
Graduate Women's Studies
York University
S709 Ross
kristasd    AT    home.com

a word of caution about this game: it implies somehow that the women who
are on welfare are not the same women who sit in your classroom. prepare
for that. these two groups are not as distinct as we sometimes assume.

best of luck,

jean noble
graduate programme in english
york university

I would like to add to this also.  Playing this kind of
game can hardly make a person aware of what it's like to live
in poverty on a daily basis, and knowing you have little chance
of getting out it.  It's a kind of soul-destroying way of life, and it
eats away at your health and any sense of wellbeing you might have.
People treat you as someone of lesser worth when you are poor,
- as though you are stupid and you brought it on yourself - you
deserve to be there.  And it feeds on itself, so as you becme poor,
you then become poorer and go further in a downward spiral.
And people who have more than you have no hesitation in taking
what little you have.

Who remembers the book - I think it was Black like Me - by
a white man who lived as a black man for a length of time.
Or the movie Tootsie.  And when being a woman didn't work
- at geting a cab - he could resort to being a man again.  Well,
there is no end to living in poverty, or if there is its sometimes
hard to see it.  Pretending is nice - its fun - and it make you
appear as a caring person that you would put yourselves through
that.  But you know it will end when you put the game away. and
that makes all the difference in the world.

Sue McPherson
sue    AT    mcphersons.freeserve.co.uk

The facilitation is critical for this game!

Do not make assumptions about your players.  We had a mixed group of women
some of who were on welfare and others who were not.  There are some
assumptions in the game that were aptly pointed out by the women who were
familiar with the welfare system.  It can be an emotional experience.  The
learning does depend a lot on the facilitation.


Erika Lloyd
Gender and Equity Studies
OISE, Toronto
(416)733-6422
erika.lloyd    AT    can.xerox.com <mailto:>

If you decide the game must be played, it would
be a good idea if it were facilitated by someone
familiar with the actual experience of coping
with poverty or at least able to empathize with it.

Sue McPherson
sue    AT    mcphersons.freeserve.co.uk

Although I am not familiar with this game, I think I recognize the possible
risks and benefits of using it with students.  It sounds to me, that if used
with the proper facilitation and preparation as Erika Lloyd points out, it can
be an enlightening and worthwhile experience for students.

How true it is that an activity like that can never truly mirror the
experience of another,  in this case living on welfare and struggling;
however, I do believe it can be a catalyst for expanding students'
perspectives and a starting point for deeping consciousness and activism.  In
other words, some students have never been pushed to consider experiences
vastly different from their own.  This type of activity allows it.

As for students who might actually be living these experiences, talking about
these issues in the context of the game/learning experience offers them the
freedom/insulation of addressing these issues in a kind of safe space; like
fiction sometimes, they can get more real about it without exposing themselves
to personal peer scrutiny UNLESS they choose to out themselves so to speak.

Additionally, I would suggest the facilitator be prepared with some kind of
"disclaimer" if necessary as the activity progresses; in other words, he/she
should be ready to make to present a brief statement/direction that allows
students to connect personally to the experience without taking some students'
comments personally since it is a growing experience.

Best,
Lisa Burke
lburke2    AT    njcu.edu

I think that an activity like this game actually does mirror
the experience of another.  It can actually set people apart.
It can create a situation in which the groups become
polarized - the well-off against the poor.  There is always
the notion that the poor deserve what they get, and it can
be frightening for those better off to look at them and see
themselves reflected, and start to think, "That could be me"
because if there is any awareness beginning to show itself,
it would be this, that 'they' are the same as 'us'.

If the facilitator or the students aren't able to connect with the
other students on this level, that is, to take it personally, to
see that it could happen to her or him, then they are placing
themselves in the position of Other.  What a good facilitator
must be able to do is put him/herself into the other's shoes
and feel what it must be like.  You can't teach a person how
to empathize. That comes from living the experience or living
a comparable experience.  It only when this distance is removed,
emotionally and socially, that the classes will become less divided.

Sue McPherson
sue    AT    mcphersons.freeserve.co.uk

Sue and others,

My point was that this kind of learning experience can never totally and
completely mirror another's experience but can provide students an opportunity
through which they begin to approximate another's/other's experience (and
consequently nuture an empathy toward others).  Maybe I did not make that clear
in my original post.

Lisa Burke
lburke2    AT    njcu.edu

On Thu, 21 Oct 1999, Sue McPherson wrote:

> I would like to add to this also.  Playing this kind of
> game can hardly make a person aware of what it's like to live
> in poverty on a daily basis, and knowing you have little chance
> of getting out it.  It's a kind of soul-destroying way of life, and it
> eats away at your health and any sense of wellbeing you might have.
> People treat you as someone of lesser worth when you are poor,
> - as though you are stupid and you brought it on yourself - you
> deserve to be there.  And it feeds on itself, so as you becme poor,
> you then become poorer and go further in a downward spiral.
> And people who have more than you have no hesitation in taking
> what little you have.
>
> Who remembers the book - I think it was Black like Me - by
> a white man who lived as a black man for a length of time.

I do.  It was by John Howard Griffin, and it served a critical function
for me just at the time I was beginning to be aware of the "race" issue
(having grown up where there were very few African-Americans).  It
"worked" for me precisely because at that stage I could identify with the
author -- who could himself walk away at the end, and freely admitted it
-- and so come a step closer to understanding the black experience in
America.  I don't think the books *by* African-Americans that I read with
profit a couple of years later (Autobiography of Malcolm X, Manchild in
the Promised Land, etc.) would have worked for me at this initial stage,
because the empathetic jump required would have been beyond me.

> Or the movie Tootsie.  And when being a woman didn't work
> - at geting a cab - he could resort to being a man again.  Well,
> there is no end to living in poverty, or if there is its sometimes
> hard to see it.  Pretending is nice - its fun - and it make you
> appear as a caring person that you would put yourselves through
> that.

    Possibly, but surely that shouldn't be the point: to "appear" as a
caring person.  If someone *is* -- potentially, in the abstract -- a
"caring person," that someone still may have difficulty in appreciating
just what those about whom s/he might care are going through.  This game
-- with which I am not familiar -- sounds as if it might be, for some
students, just such a step toward understanding.  That's all it is, a
step.  No one comes away from it as Mother Theresa.  But that (in itself)
doesn't seem to me a good reason to avoid taking (offering) the step.


> But you know it will end when you put the game away. and
> that makes all the difference in the world.

    Indeed, and you have to know that and assume that students can
appreciate it.  I remember a rather mundane summer job I once had that was
fine for the moment, in terms of pay and working conditions, but when I
looked around at all my fellow-workers who were *not* going back to school
in September, I wondered how they could stand it.  And I don't think I was
uniquely sensitive; this was the usual reaction of summer hires to such
work ("damn, I don't know how they stand doing it all the time").  So the
potential is surely there for students at least to open themselves to
recognition of how interminable, how soul-destroying, poverty can be.

>
> Sue McPherson
> sue    AT    mcphersons.freeserve.co.uk
>

    I've had some little experience with the "Green Revolution" game
used in development studies to illustrate (through role-playing) the
difficulties in implementing new agricultural technologies at the village
level.  (No gender dimension, unfortunately.)  So far as I could see, no
one's life was transformed by it -- but I think everyone in the class
understood better what was at stake.  And just possibly some of them -- as
teachers or as development officials, not as peasants themselves -- made
better decisions later on in matters affecting the peasantry.

    It's a major commitment of time for everyone, especially the
facilitator [not me].  We ran the GR game over a weekend: briefing Friday
night, the game itself all day Saturday, debriefing Sunday morning ("what
have we learned?" == with some surprising variation in answers).  So it
may not be worth it in terms of time/energy, or this particular game
(about which I know nothing) may be badly designed.  But there's a
potential for it to be an important step to understanding.


Norman G. Owen        "I'd like to be a guru, but I can't do the silences"
ngowen    AT    hku.hk         (quoted in David Hare, Via Dolorosa)

While I'm really enjoying the discussion regarding the intricacies of using
such an exercise in class, I don't recall seeing any information about how to
obtain this exercise.  Did I miss a posting or hasn't anyone responded to
that question yet?

Deb Berke
Messiah College
dberke    AT    messiah.edu

I would weigh in with Norman Owen on the poverty game.  While I understand the
objections that others have raised to using a game of this sort in the
classroom, I do think it can be an extremely useful strategy in some situations
(certainly not all). I teach in a small elite liberal arts college. Many of our
students are middle -upper middle class.  They have very little experience with
poverty and they have very little idea either of what salaries mean (most have
no idea how much money their parents make) or how much it costs to live).
Games like this can create a bit more empathy in students who are inclined to
complain that people on welfare are lazy or are living it up on the hardworking
taxpayers' money. I can't tell you how often in class I have heard anecdotes
about the neighbor on welfare who was eating steak every night.  Finally in
exasperation I came up with two different kinds of poverty games just to try to
get my students to see poverty as a reality.

The first was a kind of role-playing game in which I assigned groups of
students  different kinds of situations (e.g. welfare mother with three
children).  They had to find out from the local welfare office how much
they would get each month in welfare, housing assistance, and
in food stamps.  They were required to draw up a budget.  What would they need
to buy each month and where would the money come from.  They were required to
go out and price things--find an apartment, price food and supplies.  This
raised interesting dilemmas.  We are in a very small village with a larger town
about 5 miles away.  The students were all faced with a choice.  Do I buy
groceries at the village market where the prices are much higher because it's
basically a convenience store?  Or do I find a means to travel the 5 miles to Mt.
Vernon to go to the supermarket?  How to get there? Can I afford a car (there's
no bus service)?  They often found they had to choose between toilet paper and
tampons.  Everyone found out that they simply could not buy the necessities of
life on the amount of money welfare provides.

No this exercise will not enable them to understand the grinding effects of
poverty, but it did make many of them far more sensitive to what's at stake in
the debate over welfare which for them has always been an abstraction.

The second exercise I have done is to create a monopoly game in which everyone
starts the game with different amounts of money.  I begin by talking about the
assumptions monopoly is based on.  That we all start life equally and those who
are better get ahead (the basic premise of capitalism according to Marx in
Capital).  But the fact is that we are all dealt different hands in life.  Some
of us are born rich, some poor.  So I try to create a game in which some begin
with a lot of money, some more middle class incomes, some working class, some
extremely poor.  Then we play the game and talk about how the game develops.
Predictably the rich get really rich fast and the poor fall out early.

Again I realize there may be some problems with such exercises but with
students who have no experience with poverty, it can help them to understand
how poverty works and get them away from this notion that the poor are poor
because of some flaw in themselves.

Laurie  Finke
finkel    AT    kenyon.edu

i have to say that i'm with sue mcpherson on this issue.  i don't think
that teaching these issues as if they were role playing games is
particularly funny myself --yes, having been there and still there.  what
is a bit astounding to me is that i doubt anyone here would ever dare
encourage anyone to play "the black experience game"   i suspect that this
hasn't occurred to anyone is largely the result of noam chomsky's claim
that class is, in the US at any rate, the five letter taboo word.

here's an example, you're welcome to use it in teaching if it gives a
perspective.  someone once asked me why i didn't get grad student loans
out.  honest, it never occurred to me to do so.  best to suffer by teaching
4 jobs a semester than to get a loan out, that was my view.  their question
made me pause.  i realized that i never dared get out loans and have the
kind of debt my colleagues did because i CANNOT imagine i'll ever have a
job that will pay me the kind of money that will enable me to pay off that
loan.  oh i've had car loans and house loans when married, but quite
different things no?  a house, a car you can see them and possibly sell
them if need be; doesn't feel that way [from my perspective] with regard to
a degree!

silly?  irrational?  maybe; but maybe not!  this feeling, btw, has nothing
to do with whether i think i'm smart enough to get a well-paying job, as
i'm a bit conceited and think i'm pretty smart and know my stuff.  rather,
it has to do with an abiding sense that life isn't especially fair, that
there are systemic and systematic ways in which me and people like me will
not get ahead, no matter how hard we try.  on my theoretical perspective,
moreover, as long as we have capitalism there is no way in which me and
people like me will get ahead;  capitalism will always need people like me,
it requires it.  so, even were i to land that golden job some day it
doesn't matter much because i can look back and see my friends and family
still there --and i don't mean that literally.  a game like the poverty
game cannot and will not convey this.

that said, i'm not adverse to using such pedagogical and heuristic devices
in the classroom.  nor do i agree that a poor person has to authenticate
the "experience".  i have taught at elite unis and used them and watched as
some students "got it" and yes indeed they did NOT know how much anything
costs if they are from upper middle class backgrounds.  [that was the way i
ran that exercise;  they had to go out and do the work through interviews
of people about their budgets and by phoning up utility companies and apt
complexes and so forth].  so they can be used and they can work to open
students' eyes.  i am, though, a bit cynical and suspect that those
students are predisposed to getting it anyway.  it's largely why i left
those unis in favor of working class unis.  those students need me much
more than students from the upper middle class.

one thing i think we're forgetting:  much of what's happened in terms of
intellectual movements in the past couple of decades is the demand that we
stop seeing "race" "class" "gender" as somehow located in the raced, the
classed, the gendered.  this is what the rage against essentialism is all
about, no?  so, in that sense, these games are problematic if they utterly
fail to address racialization/sexuation/capitalism --that is, if they fail
to address how it is that people come to have race, gender, class and how
some appear not to.  more importantly, these exercises/games are appalling
if they do not ask us to interrogate those who benefit from systems of
class, race, gender exploitation and oppression.  turn the lens on people
who have privilege:  whites, men, hets, upper middle class.  make them
uncomfortable for a change, disrupt the safe, protected contexts that they
inhabit.  that's what these exercises should be about.

finally, i think it's terrific that people examine poverty.  but let's not
forget that none of this asks anyone what it means to "get out of poverty".
will it be any better for you if you land a 25k/yr job.  a bit, but of
course, as well all know, moving into that income bracket will simply
entail [generally] aspirations to things like a home and college educations
for the kids.

i've tried to tack  on an exercise that just came off another list, but it
exceeds the size limits and it comes out as gobbledegook anyway.  i'll see
what i can do to fix the mess and send another post.

in any event,  i've used a variation on it before.  i had them get into
groups of 4-5.  then handed out "scenarios" which they found themselves in.
half the class had to be a family of three, single mother, mcdonald's job,
ex-husband extremely low wage and therefor not contributing much by way of
child support [good to talk about those who don't pay; but let's talk about
how little people sometimes are actually awarded because it highlights how
little the non-custodial parents are making too!]  those families had to
find an apartment, daycare, and figure out how to work and go to college in
order to get ahead.

the rest of the class was that same family five years later, only under
different circumstances.  she's now living with a partner  and sharing
expenses.  they want to buy a home and since the kids are older they're
starting to think about college.  the partner's job pays about 15k.  she
has moved to part time work that has a bit more status [a job she acquired
via schooling and the contacts she made there] and she's doing so that she
can be in college full-time.  now they have to budget for a down payment
and for college savings.

when i find that exercise, i'll forward it along.  but above are the broad
outlines and the below is what inspired me.  frankly, i tossed the "game"
aspect of the below as it was a bit troubling to say the least.

best,
kelley