Usa Stratified Monopoly: A Simulation Game About Social Class Stratification

EFFECTIVELY TEACHING COLLEGE STU DENTS about social class stratification is a difficult challenge. Explanations for this difficulty tend to focus on the students who often react with resistance, paralysis, or rage (Davis 1992). They have relatively little work experience outside the service industry (Corrado et al. 2000) and limited awareness of social class stratification ex cept for numerous stereotypes (Jessup 2001; Miller 1992; Tiemann, Davis, and Terri 2006). Students tend to overestimate individual causes and effort, and underestimate situ ational determinants when accounting for social inequality (Ross 1977). They have been taught to value individualism and com petition and to believe in the American Dream, which "is based on cultural beliefs and values that support the economic status quo" (Tiemann et al. 2006:398). Because students have been taught to believe equality and fairness govern the economic system in the United States, they adhere to "bootstrap ideology," which suggests that inequality exists because people possess different lev els of drive and ability (Brezina 1996). Sociologists have been using games and simulations as alternative methods for sev eral decades to teach about these sensitive subjects (Coleman et al. 1973; Greenblat 1971; Greenblat and Duke 1981; McKeachie 1999). Games are contests gov erned by rules that synthesize cognitive and affective learning, while simulations are games that represent selected fragments of reality (Jessup 2001). Teachers of sociology use simulation games as an effective means of bridging sociological abstractness and direct experience (Davis, Duke, and Gam son 1981; Goldsmid and Wilson 1980). Another advantage is that they are effective referents for ongoing learning, because stu dents retain information longer and prefer them to traditional methods. Some research indicates that games are at least as effective, and in some cases more effective, than tra ditional methods (Coleman et al. 1973; Jes sup 2001; Petranek 1994; Randel et al. 1992). There are many examples of games to teach about social class stratification in the literature. After randomly assigning groups of students a race, class, and gender, Wetcher-Hendricks and Luquet (2003) gave groups different sized boxes of crayons and asked them to draw objects without sharing crayons. Similarly, Corrado et al. (2000) asked groups to create the same objects with different allocations of playdoh to demon strate the effects of unequal distribution of resources. Ghetto is a game designed to sensitize privileged students to the living conditions of the poor (Miller 1992). Several simulation games focus on the issues surrounding social class stratification and social change. Starpower is a simulation game where players exchange resources of unequal value in a system where the rules favor the wealthy and the most privileged group is eventually given the power to make the rules governing the game. Sociopoly utilizes teams playing the board game Mo *The author would like to thank the anony mous reviewers as well as Dana Atwood Harvey, David Hartmann, Patricia Sanders, Thomas Van Valey, Robert Wait, and Carol White for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Please address all correspondence to the author at Center for Gender and Women's Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalama zoo, MI 49008; e-mail: edith.fisher@wmich.edu. Editor's note: The reviewers wer , in alpha betical order, Karen Albright and Michael J s sup.