Director’s Blog

January 10, 2011

Reacting to the Past: A Way Forward for Both the Classroom and the University

This posting I am recommending a website rather than a book: Barnard History Professor Mark Carnes’ “Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) curriculum. Briefly put, Reacting to the Past Curricula are elaborate games that reconstruct the historical context of a particular period in human history. Students are assigned roles that they must play during the game. They must also do research on the basis of those roles. Students must play Gandhi or Jinnah during the eve of India’s independence. Or they might play the owner of a seventeenth-century theater who must judge between the submissions of Marlowe and Shakespeare. Many of the curricula have been published in the Pearson Series, such as that focusing on Athens in the fifth century BCE, and Confucian emperors in the sixteenth century CE.

As Mark Carnes writes, in Reacting to the Past Curricula, students learn the skills of critical thinking, strategy, empathy, and citizenship more effectively. The RTTP Curricula work “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.”

I have begun to use RTTP curricula out of both love and necessity. My choice was motivated by love because I have always thought this was one of the most effective ways to learn—to teach students not just to think about historical characters but to ask them actually to be those characters for a little while. My choice was motivated by necessity because I was in a bind this past fall semester. I had taken on a course that was new for me: “Introduction to South Asian Civilization.” Because of my own time constraints, I did not want to face fifteen term papers at the end of the semester. And yet, even without those term papers, I wanted to teach my students critical thinking and writing skills as well as the basics of South Asian civilization. Most of all, I wanted to teach them research skills because in my view, the ability to do ethical, careful research on the web actually can give students the critical capacities they will need in the rest of their careers. Good research on the web shows them how to differentiate trustworthy and untrustworthy information. Good research on the web teaches digital ethics. Good research on the web informs them about the conversations are happening about a particular topic.

So I decided to use a modified version of the RTTP curriculum. I wrote historical scenarios for each unit of the course. Each historical scenario involved a problem to be solved in a period of South Asian history. In the early period, I devised scenarios involving emerging sociopolitical and religious ideas: a Magadhan king who needs a Buddhist’s and Jain’s advice as to whether he should allow one village to build a bridge and a dam at the expense of another village; a bard who makes a mistake in reciting the great epic of the Ramayana in the early Gupta court and whose punishment must be decided by the courtiers; and so on. The one difference between my own approach and that of RTTP was that I did not have winners and losers in the game; I had only possible solutions to social, ethical, economic, and religious problems.

I divided the fifteen students into five “study and performance groups” of three students each. Each student took on a character’s role and did research on the basis of that character. And each group had to solve the same problem. On Mondays, I lectured about the period. On Wednesdays, we performed our scenarios. At the beginning of class on Wednesdays, the five groups met as groups to share their research on their different roles. Then I asked them to assume their roles and begin to solve the problem. We then met in plenary session, and I asked each person who had a particular role to share their research and challenges of their role. All five students who had that role had done different research, and as a result, all five groups came up with a slightly different solution to the historical problems. After we discussed each individual role, we gathered in plenary to talk more generally. At the end of each session, the students handed in annotated bibliographies on two articles that they had used to research their individual roles.

In plenary, we discussed the relative merit and workability of each group’s solution. Some solutions were more historically accurate than others. The students tended to be democratic and conciliatory in their solutions. As a result, we spoke about the roles of monarchy, hierarchy and agency in South Asian history. The students tended toward gender equity in their solutions. As a result, we spoke about changing gender roles and values in South Asian history. Would the courtesan have had the power to refuse the tax collector? Why or why not? Would the scribal assistant to the sultan have offered to represent the newly converted Muslim weaver in the marketplace? Why or why not? And so on. And finally, I asked one group each week to perform the scenario in front of their peers. There is nothing like performance peer pressure to focus the mind.

This pedagogical approach helped me and my students to be more engaged with the material than I had thought possible. What is more, consistent with my pedagogical goals, they were more focused and better researchers than I had dreamed possible. While it took them a few weeks to get the hang of what an annotated bibliography actually was, they eventually began to see certain articles they found on the web as better or worse sources for helping them think about their assigned roles. They began to see how authors used evidence to make their case about the nature of persons and societies in South Asian history. They began to see how the relative clarity of presentation and argument in any given article could help them play their roles better. They began to differentiate between their own cultural contexts and others. The immediacy of their particular historical roles focused their minds. I knew I had accomplished something when one student blurted out, “I know I myself would have wanted to help the courtesan in that situation, but the king wouldn’t have! And I have to play the king!”

I think this pedagogy is a good approach for students in all subjects. Humanists and social scientists ask students to think through problems as if they were there. The RTTP curriculum takes that one step further and extends the imaginative process over several days in the classroom. And the best scientists ask their students to apply the scientific principles that they have learned to new problems they have devised for their exams. The RTTP curriculum asks students not just to think about it, but to enact it, to be it. Professional schools, particularly business and law schools, use case-based scenarios all the time in their pedagogies. The RTTP approach elaborates the case-based approach and puts the student in the middle of the action. Health sciences—medicine, nursing, even public health—use simulations and problem-based learning as a staple of their teaching. The RTTP approach is a version of this idea, using the past as well as the present. Situational thinking allows students to look at human possibilities—both ethical and unethical, reasonable and unreasonable choices, and what conditions and dispositions might motivate such choices.

I also think the RTTP curriculum, and curricula like it, are good for universities. They allow faculty members to speak across their particular curricula and imagine each other’s situations. For example, the other day, in our Distinguished Teaching Scholars Seminar, a number of non-medical faculty were thinking through the possibilities of an eye disease with a leading ophthalmologist using the same kinds of situational principles as RTTP curricula suggest.

And perhaps most importantly, I wonder if we might use RTTP to help members of universities think about their own institutional pasts. In a sense, Emory University has accomplished this in part through the Transforming Community Project (TCP), led by historian Leslie Harris and funded both by the Ford Foundation and, more recently, by the Provost’s office. During its first five years, the project asked Emory citizens to imagine their own past in new situational ways—beginning with histories of race at Emory. It has recently branched out into questions of gender, sexuality, and international politics at the university. How have situations at Emory prompted its individuals to make certain kinds of decisions, some of which we are proud of and some of which we might disagree with today? While much of the TCP project did not involve the elaborate form of gaming that RTTP does, it did involve thinking within an Emory past. And if TCP’s preliminary results are to be understood, everyone who participated in TCP “won” in that they imagined, and thus owned, their own intellectual community in new ways. On February 3rd, 2011, leaders of the TCP project at Emory will host a workshop for more than twenty-five universities to share best practices. Immediately following the workshop Emory will host a conference on slavery and the university—a very brave way indeed to react to, and better imagine, the past.

What if every university had a curriculum about itself such as TCP and asked its citizens to participate in such an imaginative project about its past and present? My guess is that such a curriculum would prompt institutional imaginations in higher education in crucial ways and perhaps give us tools with which to rethink the university in the twenty first century.