Here's a thought. From my experience, RPGs at their finest boil down to collective storytelling/problem solving. It would be cool to look into this and it's application (much like you said) to the school learning experience. The one problem you might have with this is I don't think there is necessarily specific information on it. But on the flip-side, if you pull it off, it would be incredibly impressive. Essentially what I'm kind of curious about (namely because I am preparing for a career in teaching high school science) is the possibility of something RPG-esque in say, a physics classroom. I can imagine an activity where the instructor introduces a situation and the students explain how they want to address it, doing the proper physics to discover if it's feasible or not. Then you have the back and forth of they have this solution and the teacher introduces tweaks to the situation (much like combat) and the students react and make changes. The research would likely revolve around the academic benefits and effectiveness of RPGs (or similar social activities). You would also likely need to do some research on timing to see whether or not it is actually feasible to run something like this (i.e. how much physics or whatever could be taught in this manner, because, unfortunately, schools are on a time budget). In short, I guess your topic could be: using concepts and structure of tabletop RPGs to teach school lessons. Because even if you can't just straight drop a DnD encounter into the classroom, there is definitely a unique relationship between GM and players that actually is quite similar to how a classroom could be run.
The more I think about this, the cooler this idea seems (to me at least
). Let me know if you would like to chat some more, especially because I could see myself trying some of this in a few years...
