Students are Relishing
Their Roles in History
By Trinity Peacock-Broyles
I am perplexed. I want to know why these
Smith students, sitting with me around a table in a Seelye
classroom, have
placed themselves in a class where the professor is called “gamemaster” and
he neither lectures nor participates in discussion. As I
look around at the animated faces of the students and at
the professor sitting quietly
in the corner, I realize that while the professor holds the
fancy title, it is the students who are in control.
Sarah Epstein ’05
walks to the podium and begins a sermon in her role as pastor
of the church: “I speak to you this day in the name of God the
Father,
the Son and the Holy Spirit. Brothers and sisters in Christ...” and the
imaginative re-creation of a second trial of Anne Hutchinson in Colonial Massachusetts
begins.
This is all part of a new course that Smith
students say is both challenging and fun. Listening to the
heated arguments going back and forth across the table,
I would have to agree. Students cajole, raise their voices, plead and still
find space for laughter. I learn that instead of using a
traditional class format,
Reenacting the Past: History as Hypothesis involves 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 games. He saw the “reenacting” games as
a “new
and refreshing way to teach theory to students.”
The game concept calls
for students to be makers of their own destiny and controllers of history,
Coby tells me. “Students write to persuade their peers, not
the professor, so they write well and read carefully.” As I sit and observe,
I enjoy students’ speeches, which are crafted to sway their fellow classmates
and handed in to the gamemaster to be graded.
Although the gamemaster helps initiate
the class and can step in when technical issues arise, the students determine
the moves. I am mystified by the scraps
of paper circulating between coalitions and to the gamemaster until I discover
it is all part of the strategizing students must undertake. As to how the Hutchinson
game is played, computer science major Angela Murphy ’04
says, “The game concept is that you get the members of the church and/or
the general court to vote in a way that your role would have wanted in Colonial
Massachusetts. There are many ways to ‘win’; you want to read up
on everything you can find in order to increase your possibility of winning.” Smith
students have the opportunity to hold a fictional second trial set in 1638
to determine whether to overturn the prior actual decision to banish the pregnant
Hutchinson from the colony.
I ask the students if they 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 Ariadne Nevin ’04, a cognitive
science major. “Participants have to cultivate a certain strength of will,
part of which includes controlling how much time you spend on the class.”
Still
in its experimental stage, Reenacting the Past will most likely continue to
be offered as a first-year seminar each semester. The 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 interdepartmental course (IDP 111) will be offered in the spring
and will be open to all students, including those who took
the fall semester course.
As for me, I would love the opportunity
to be an active participant in the
games, but having only one semester left of my college career, I don’t
have the time. If only I were a first-year again! Well, not really.
Loras
College, Pace University, Trinity College (Connecticut), Queens College
and Queensborough Community College are either offering the games as
part
of their curriculum 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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