Reacting to the Past
By Andrew McConnell Stott, USC Dornsife College Dean of Undergraduate Education and Academic Affairs, Professor of English – June 19, 2020
Many of us use case-based teaching and scenarios as the context for in-class debates. They’re a great way to introduce students to a range of perspectives, and to understand the deeper foundational ideas that give rise to opinion. “Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) games take this a step further, providing fully-immersive scenarios that allow students to role-play their way through key decision points in history, politics, culture, science and literature. As such, they’re a great tool for collaborative learning, and project-based classes.
The “Reacting” concept was developed in the 1990s by Mark Carnes, professor of History at Barnard College, with a view to creating a student-centered pedagogy based on self-guided learning, extensive collaboration, critical, integrative thinking, and debate. In essence, the class takes the form of a role-playing game in which students are presented with a scenario and asked to assume a character. Instructors can use a pre-written game or develop their own (some assembly required). Students can find themselves at the Continental Congress, on the eve of Indian Independence, trying to resolve the Wanli Succession Crisis, negotiating the 1989 Long Range Transport Pollution treaty, debating the Constitution with Frederick Douglass, or attending at a symposium of the British Society for the Advancement of Science to discuss the theories of Charles Dawin and Samuel Wilberforce. A series of STEM games is also available.
In spring 2020, I ran the RTTP game “Stages of Power, 1592: Marlowe and Shakespeare” in my “English Literature to 1800” class. The game was scheduled to occupy the second half of the semester, and as such, it took place entirely online. The setting was the London theater industry of the late sixteenth century and the competing interests of two acting companies both vying for a license to perform from the Master of Revels over the objections of their rivals.
Students were assigned historically-accurate roles and split into three groups — the Admiral’s Men, representing the playwright Christopher Marlowe and his play Doctor Faustus; Lord Strange’s Men, representing the upstart William Shakespeare and his play Richard III; and the Privy Council, a panel consisting of Elizabethan divines and worthies, each with agendas of their own. The groups proceeded to work on a number of tasks including developing formal arguments for and against the plays based on primary sources (no anachronism allowed); editing the plays for performance; performing versions of the plays; and delivering final arguments. The Privy Council, meanwhile, not only sat in judgement, but delivered rebuttals, approved and “censored” the plays according to Elizabethan standards and practices, and wrote and performed a pageant in honor of Elizabeth I based on George Gascoigne’s “The Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth” (1576). By the time we were done, students had collaborated, performed, debated, edited, composed, invented, and researched the political, religious, aesthetic and commercial aspects of Elizabethan drama in far more detail than they would have done otherwise, motivated by their enjoyment of the game, its immersive qualities, and (no doubt) the Trojan desire to win.
As an instructor, the game requires quite a lot of upfront organization, especially developing a calendar of activities (some portion of students will submit some writing every session), and keeping them on task. I kept track of who was who, their motivations and secret instructions (inter-character intrigue and subterfuge adds an interesting subtext to the game) via a large spreadsheet that also contained dates for instructions and due dates for assignments. That aside, it ran itself with very little input from me. While the game would be great in person, online delivery worked well. Students collaborated and shared documents via GoogleDocs; I used breakout rooms to put them in their groups to do their work, dropping in occasionally to check in; while the performances were supplemented with a range of Zoom backgrounds and home-made props, including moustaches, ruffs, and aristocratic hats.
RTTP games are great if you’re looking for an immersive, student-focussed experience that is relatively easy to run. (And it’s important to note that these are not just humanities-based games, as the website shows). A single game takes about six weeks. I used it as a way to enact many of the concepts established in the first part of the semester, but some professors jump right in or run two games a semester. They are best for groups of less than twenty five, but their flexibility allows you to add or subtract complexity as you prefer. They can run entirely online, or perhaps you could run one in hybrid fashion with online meetings supplemented with occasional in-person sessions.