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By Trinity Peacock-Broyles
What kind of strange class is
this where the professor neither lectures nor participates
in discussion and is called the “gamemaster”?
One afternoon, in a Seelye classroom last fall, the “herald,”
a Smith College student, held up a picture of a pig and declared,
“I stand here with this pig and invoke the gods!”
In a symbolic gesture of slaughter, she proceeded to crumple
up the depiction. Once the “sacrifice” was complete,
the “president,” another Smith student, took her
position before the group and began her speech: “Fellow
assemblymen..., ” and the game was on.
This is all part of a new course
that Smith students say is both challenging and fun. Instead
of using a traditional class format, Reenacting the Past:
History as Hypothesis involves its students in three complicated
games where they assume the roles of important characters
in notable periods of history. The brainchild of Mark Carnes,
a Barnard College history professor, the games have taken
on a new dimension at Smith, which is the first participating
school to offer the course to upper-division students. The
games began in the fall with two interdepartmental courses
as well as two sections of a first-year seminar. Government
professor Patrick Coby attended a conference last summer at
Barnard to learn how to run the game. While he was “skeptical
at first, thinking that college-age students would feel embarrassed
by role-playing,” he also saw the “Reenacting”
games as a “new refreshing way to teach theory to students.
”
The game concept of Reenacting
the Past transforms students from passive listeners to active
participants, posing them as makers of their own destiny and
controllers of history, Coby notes. “The class is very
exciting because students get to move history in ways that
didn’t occur. It is mesmerizing how [the games] capture
your attention and make you want to perform at the height
of your ability.” Coby adds, “Students write to
persuade their peers, not the professor, so they write well
and become very careful readers.”
Although the gamemaster helps
get the class started and can step in when technical issues
arise, the students ultimately run the game. Because students
are graded on the persuasiveness of their arguments, they
must sharpen both their speaking and writing skills. As to
how the game is played, computer science major Angela Murphy
’04 says, “The game concept is that you get the
assembly (the class) to vote and pass laws that your role
would have wanted to pass in ancient Athens. There are many
ways to 'win' including to get people to vote for your cause,
such as trading votes or knowing more about the subject. It
is this latter method where the research part of the class
comes in. You want to read up on everything you can find in
order to increase your possibility of winning.”
Do students enjoy this new approach?
“I love the game!” says Sarah Epstein ’05.
Medieval studies major Cate Hirschbiel ’05 agrees but
adds, “It is certainly my most challenging class.”
The game has helped Dayna Hardtman ’06 discover that
history is not just “about dates and historical events,
but most importantly, about the people, the ideas, the explorations,
the quandaries, the downfalls and tragedies [all of which
I am now] able to relate to the present.... and isn't that
what history is all about?”
The course can be demanding of
a student’s time. Because it is exciting and the research
possibilities endless, students find that the “class
is fun but a little stressful,” says Adriadne Nevin
’04, a cognitive science major“I like having an
argument to yell at people about; I find that very liberating.”
Nevin suggests that participants “cultivate a certain
strength of willYou have to make your arguments well, listen
to scathing comments against your statements, try to refute
them and, most importantly, control how much time you spend
on the class.”
In the first game of the semester,
Athens After the Peloponnesian War, students learn to play
such roles as oligarchs, indeterminates, radical democrats
and moderate democrats. Nevin is a radical democrat with set
objectives; in addition she is “Thrasybulus, a navy
general who was instrumental in beating the Thirty Tyrants,”
she explains. “Being a specific person is harder, I
think.” She has to know how her character would react
as well as what a radical democrat would do. Hard as that
may seem, it doesn’t stop Nevin from loving the game.
“I think it's a wonderful pedagogy. I've never been
terribly interested in democracy as an idea, but now I find
myself looking for ways to improve its flaws, or make its
ideals more practical.”
Still in its experimental stage,
Reenacting the Past will most likely continue to be offered
as a first-year seminar, available each semester. Coby notes,
“One interdepartmental section may be converted to a
first-year seminar with the other one still open to upper-class
students.” Each class consists of three competitive
games that last a month each: Athens After the Peloponnesian
War (403–399 B.C.); Succession Struggles in the Ming
Dynasty (China in the 16th century); and the Trial of Anne
Hutchinson (Colonial Massachusetts).
The second-semester offering
is a separate course with a different set of games, featuring
the French Revolution (1791); Freud, Jung, and the Rise of
the Unconscious (Vienna at the turn of the century); and Indian
Independence (1945). Two sections of this course (FYS 144)
will be offered in the spring and will be open to all first-year
students, including those who took the fall semester course.
Loras College, Pace University,
Trinity College (Connecticut), Queens College and Queensborough
Community College have also implemented the game or are planning
their own versions. The Smith version was retitled “Reenacting
the Past,” instead of the original “Reacting to
the Past,” because Professor Coby wanted “to capture
the theatrical dimension of the course, which ‘Reenacting’
suggests.” The pedagogy behind the course was supported
by a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary
Education from the U.S. Department of Education. Mark Carnes
is the author of all games; Pearson Publishing Company holds
the 2003 copyright for the game format.
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