I was first introduced to “Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) while teaching as an adjunct professor at Gustavus Adolphus College, a small liberal arts college in southern Minnesota. Two friends—one in Political Science and the other in Religion—had recommended it to me as a creative and engaging way to teach students about the past. Although I was unable to participate in a RTTP conference while teaching in Minnesota, I received a TCU Instructional Development Grant to attend the annual conference held at Barnard College in New York in June 2008.
Mark Carnes, a professor of American History, developed RTTP at Barnard and it has grown into an organized program that sponsors the annual national conference on the Barnard campus and regional conferences. RTTP has published some ten “games” with another twenty-five or so in development.
The program’s web site describes RTTP as follows:
In most classes students learn by receiving ideas and information from instructors and texts, or they discuss such materials in seminars. “Reacting to the Past” courses employ a different pedagogy. Students learn by taking on roles, informed by classic texts, in elaborate games set in the past; they learn skills—speaking, writing, critical thinking, problem solving, leadership, and teamwork—in order to prevail in difficult and complicated situations. That is because Reacting roles, unlike those in a play, do not have a fixed script and outcome. While students will be obliged to adhere to the philosophical and intellectual beliefs of the historical figures they have been assigned to play, they must devise their own means of expressing those ideas persuasively, in papers, speeches or other public presentations; and students must also pursue a course of action they think will help them win the game.
At Barnard and other institutions that have adopted the pedagogy, a typical RTTP course will include three games that take up an entire semester. In the Liberal Arts Honors Program at the University of Texas-Austin, for example, students have the option of enrolling in two RTTP sections for Spring 2012, each of which used three published games: The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C.; Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wan-li Emperor, 1587 A.D.; and Rousseau, Burke, and the Revolution in France, 1791. Larry Carver, a Professor in UT’s English Department and Director of the Honors program, is a regular and dedicated Reacting participant who facilitates the India game at the annual conference.
As part of these courses, students read a “game book” that describes the context of widely varied historical events: the Council of Nicea, the trial of Galileo, and the Trail of Tears, as well as the American Civil Rights movement, the struggle for Palestine, and the development of Athenian democracy. During a game, students engage in various sorts of activities: they’ll read the speeches of Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah about an independent India, the views of Nelson Mandela and Stephen Biko on the injustice of Apartheid and future of South Africa, or the teachings of Confucius and Mencius about the proper role of the Son of Heaven in China. Students then take on specific roles in the game as outlined in their individual role sheets and are required to do primary research, write position papers, negotiate and debate with other students and their factions, and give public speeches. RTTP thus requires students to practice an array of intellectual and social skills, including working as a team to pursue a set of shared objectives. For example, in the India game a student could be assigned to a faction representing the interests of the British, the Untouchables, Gandhi and Nehru’s Congress Party, Jinnah’s Muslim League, the Sikhs, the Communists, rural India, or the so-called “princely states.”
Since attending the 2008 workshop—I’ve been back in 2011 and 2012—I have taught the India game each semester in World Religions and once in Religion and Violence. The India game, written by Ainslie Embree (Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University and former president of the Association of Asian Studies) and Mark Carnes, recreates the conditions leading up to Partition in 1947 when the subcontinent was divided into India and Pakistan. Students are required to study and then apply primary source material from the game book titled Defining a Nation: India on the Eve of Independence-1945, Sources of Indian Tradition, The Bhagavad Gita, and other materials in negotiations and debate at a conference in the Indian city of Shimla that will determine the shape of an independent India. And while some students are assigned major speaking roles, others are given supporting roles, and others yet are asked to serve as reporters, web site designers, and videographers—roles that I have added because the World Religions class with 35 to 40 students is larger than a typical RTTP course. While all students must read the background materials and take the same quizzes and exams, this division of labor enables them to participate in ways that resonate with their individual learning styles. And while the history of Partition is valuable in itself, it also serves as the context for introducing students to more recent events, such as the conflict between India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir, the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu nationalists, and the Mumbai attacks of 2008.
I have also used a game set in China’s Ming dynasty (1368-1644) in my upper-level East Asian Religions course. That game, titled Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor, 1587 focuses on a dispute over imperial succession, pitting Confucian traditionalists against their progressive opponents, each of whom must apply the principles of Confucianism to argue for or against the Son of Heaven’s decision to break with the traditional right of primogeniture by naming his third-born son as successor. In the game, one student plays the role of Emperor Wanli, another plays the First Grand Secretary, and the other students are members of the Hanlin Academy—the highest governing body in the land whose ranks are filled with scholars who passed the highest level of the civil service exam.
I’ve been delighted with the results of these two games, which have generated a lot of enthusiasm among my students—some of whom have come in costumes or broken out Texas-inflected British accents—and taught them a variety of useful critical thinking skills. These two games will also be the focus of an Honors course I am developing with the support of a Cultural Visions grant.
This article was written by Mark Dennis, Ph.D., Professor of Religion, for the Spring 2013 Issue of Insights Magazine.