To the Editor:
I read Mark C. Carnes’s “The Liminal Classroom” (The Chronicle Review, October 8) with great interest. ... As one who has taught a Reacting to the Past seminar, I can testify how enormously successful it has been in bringing students directly into an engagement with historical material and into lively participation in classroom discussions of great ideas. In my 35 years of teaching I have never experienced such a strongly motivated class. ...
The students knew the stakes were high for their roles in the seminar and for the groups to which they belonged. They found that the course put them squarely in the middle of historically significant debates, and brought home to them the fact that history is the vital interaction and dialogue of people around crucial issues. ...
Students in the seminar went to the library the first day of class and did enormous amounts of original research to perform their roles correctly. And they learned to think on their feet and to express themselves as fluently in speech as they were expected to do in writing.
In short, the seminar was education at its very best: intense, collaborative, and a deep immersion in the great debates of history.
Frank G. Kirkpatrick Interim Dean of the Faculty Professor of Religion Trinity College Hartford, Conn.
***
To the Editor:
I am a faculty member who has adopted Reacting to the Past. I had heard great praise for the course from my dean and, more importantly, from his daughter, a student at Barnard College who had taken the course. I had also attended a workshop at Barnard in the summer of 2003. I remained, however, skeptical of students’ taking over a class and playing games.
Having taught the French Revolution game in an upper-division honors class on the Enlightenment last spring, I am now teaching three of the games in a freshman honors class. I have become a believer. ...
I have never seen students this engaged. They write more than the assignments require; everyone, shy or not, participates vigorously in the debates. They read important texts with real understanding, making complex arguments and ideas their own. And they spend countless hours outside of class, collaborating to marshal winning arguments. ...
My freshmen recently left Athens in 403 BC. In a few minutes, as members of the Grand Secretariat, they will be presenting their first memorials to the Wanli emperor. It is remarkably warm for October in the Forbidden City in this year of 1587, but the grand secretaries cannot wait to meet. Neither can I.
Larry Carver Professor of English Director Liberal Arts Honors Programs University of Texas Austin, Tex.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 12, Page B22
