The goal was simple: stop Charles Darwin from winning the big prize.
Those were my instructions for a role-playing game, called Charles Darwin, the Copley Medal, and the Rise of Naturalism, 1862-64, set during a meeting of the Royal Society in London. I was assigned to play the secretary of a faction of members opposed to awarding the prestigious Copley to Darwin for his book On the Origin of Species.
A package of background readings and a biographical description of the character, probably a composite, arrived before the meeting. The secretary was religious, the description said, but his main objection to Darwin was scientific.
“You will argue strongly in favor of inductive scientific research, and you will strongly disapprove of Darwin’s speculative methodology and conclusions,” it said. “You must be very clear about Darwin’s theory, its weaknesses, and even its strengths, so that you may prepare to debate its merits.”
The Darwin game is part of Reacting to the Past, a teaching method that asks students to play roles in elaborate games set during pivotal moments in history. Created by Mark C. Carnes, a history professor at Barnard College, Reacting to the Past organizes students into competing factions during times of great tumult, like the French Revolution, the emergence of democracy in ancient Athens, a succession crisis in imperial China, and the trial of Galileo in 17th-century Rome.
Students read a text, often from the canon, and are given an objective to win the game. They have to debate, give oral presentations, submit written work, and navigate shifting alliances with other students over three weeks of classes, while the professor introduces historical twists.
Since its creation in the mid-1990s, the method has been adopted by some 300 colleges. Elite institutions were the first to try it, and it has spread to less-selective regional universities and community colleges. Faculty and students have embraced it with a fervor not often seen in higher education.
Devotees of the method have their favorite stories: The students who argue over philosophy and discuss role-playing strategy in the dining hall or lobby their professors to make more time for class. Such anecdotes run counter to the narrative of students failing to study or learn much while in college, though even Reacting to the Past’s supporters do not claim their method is a panacea.
Advocates hope that the relative speed with which the method has been adopted across institutions suggests that it can bring change to the curriculum.
“My guess is that over the next few years, clusters of Reacting games will function as alternatives to the menu system of general education at more and more colleges and universities,” Mr. Carnes said in an e-mail interview. Or, he said, the games could be used in capstone courses or as a way to make large survey classes more engaging.
Skeptics worry, however, that the method focuses too narrowly on specific events and texts, inevitably leaving out whole chunks of the curriculum. Others are skittish about handing students authority for running their classes; they also fear that poorly prepared students, who already demonstrate difficulty analyzing and forming arguments, will remember incorrect lessons from the material if they are assigned roles supporting ideas that have been left in history’s dustbin.
‘Far More Intense’
Practitioners of Reacting to the Past gather for regular meetings to play new games and discuss pedagogy. On the Barnard campus here last month, faculty members and students, both the uninitiated and veterans of the method, played shortened versions of the games. While the games at this conference had just seven hours to unfold, instead of two weeks of preparation followed by as many as 14 classes of play, the experience still gave a sense of how the games work.
The conference featured the kinds of moments you don’t see at most scholarly meetings. One participant in the game Rousseau, Burke, and the Revolution in France, 1791 draped a French flag over his shoulders.
Two others, who were playing abolitionists in Frederick Douglass, Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Constitution: 1845, wore makeshift bonnets made of white table napkins.
Anne Osborne, a professor of East Asian history at Rider University, played Sir Richard Owen, an anatomist and paleontologist who opposed Darwin; she wore a cravat made of black construction paper.
“The Reacting conference is not a normal academic gathering,” Mark D. Higbee, a professor of history at Eastern Michigan University, and creator of the Abolition game, wrote in a note seeking to persuade his colleagues to attend. It is, he wrote, “far more intense, frankly, and lots of people from diverse institutions and academic fields, enthusiastically learning about a rather weird, but tremendously fun, pedagogy.”
The Darwin game is tamer than other games, some of which feature mob outbursts, Machiavellian political intrigue, and the occasional assassination. The 27 participants in the Darwin game were assigned roles as historical figures with established views of the naturalist or as composite characters, some of whom could be swayed to align with either side.
To prepare, participants had to read most of the 160-page workbook for the game, which included excerpts from On the Origin of Species, introduced the historical context, spelled out the rules of the game, described the main characters, and supplied a half-dozen primary-source documents. Also recommended was Janet Browne’s Darwin’s Origin of Species: a Biography.
Having an assigned point of view altered how I read the text. Instead of looking to simply understand the material, I was reading it from a particular vantage point, seeking to grasp it well enough to poke holes in Darwin’s methods. Our side failed to win the day; our meeting of the Royal Society voted to give Darwin the Copley two years before he actually won it.
Students say the role-playing lends an emotional dimension to the readings, which helps them stick with often dense and difficult texts.
“The reading material acts as a means toward building an argument rather than an end in itself,” says Lily Lamboy, who played the game at Smith College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. “Knowing the material is necessary for your character’s survival and success, not just for your grade in the class.”
Peer pressure also serves as a motivator. As students essentially take over the class, their competitiveness kicks in, but the grades take on less importance, says Niki Harris, a rising junior at the University of Utah. “They became obsessed with beating each other, and that my-horse-is-bigger-than-your-horse debate powered the classroom.”
Research published in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 2009 discerned benefits to students. Reacting to the Past produced higher self-esteem, empathy, and the belief that people can change over time, the researchers found. It also developed rhetorical skills and increased students’ comfort with unpredictability, while neither hurting nor helping their writing skills.
“These findings suggest that a pedagogy that appears to increase motivation and engagement in course material also produces several benefits that typically have been associated with academic success,” Steven J. Stroessner, a professor of psychology at Barnard, wrote with his co-authors.
More research is forthcoming. A grant from the National Science Foundation will support an assessment of how Reacting to the Past affects students’ knowledge of scientific content and alters their attitudes toward science.
But some advocates of the method do not want to put a lot of emphasis on quantitative measures. Many prefer to cite the broader effects of the teaching strategy on students and faculty.
“It revitalized my career,” says Elizabeth E. Dunn, a professor of history at Indiana University at South Bend, and a co-author of the workbook for the Darwin game. “Reacting’s not going to solve every problem in the classroom, but it’ll help a lot of students.”
‘Blind Leading the Blind’
Reacting to the Past is not immune to problems in the classroom, however.
B. Kamran Swanson, a philosophy instructor at Harold Washington College of the City Colleges of Chicago described how a few students in his Great Books class snickered when he told them they would be playing games.
As they worked in small groups to analyze and discuss the Analects of Confucius, some of them made fun of the game’s concept or the name of the philosopher. “It was discouraging the first few times I saw it,” says Mr. Swanson, another co-author of the workbook for the Darwin game.
A few weeks later, he sensed a turnaround when a student, playing the Wanli Emperor, entered the class. One of the skeptical students stood and bowed, observing the proper protocol. The other skeptic didn’t and, as punishment, had to recite and interpret one of the analects in front of the rest of the class.
Not every student makes that switch, although Mr. Swanson believes the method is effective in community colleges. At various kinds of colleges, the students who object most stridently to being asked to play a role tend to be the ones who prosper in traditional classes. Some students complain that their college should give them opportunities to be lectured to by an expert, not taught by their fellow students.
That mode of peer learning also worries faculty members like Adam Kovach, an associate professor of philosophy at Marymount University, in Arlington, Va., who attended the conference to weigh whether he wanted to use the method. He remained skeptical after the event.
Many students already have difficulty distinguishing a statement of facts from an argument, he said. Entrusting students who have a tenuous grasp of the subject matter to teach other students raises concerns. “Don’t you have the blind leading the blind?” Mr. Kovach asked.
Such concerns are typical, says Mr. Carnes, Reacting to the Past’s creator, and faculty members are almost always skeptical when they first encounter the method. “It is a radically different teaching paradigm,” he says.
While some faculty members rarely talk while games are in session, the role-playing has some built-in mechanisms to maintain control. Instructors can quietly pass a note to a student to correct a flaw in logic, or inject themselves as characters. A debriefing period follows each game, in which faculty explain how history actually unfolded.
Other skeptics worry about dedicating too much class time to discrete events, thus leaving whole areas of the curriculum uncovered. It is a complaint common to methods that focus on a specific moment or theme instead of giving a sense of the broad sweep of a discipline.
But traditional survey courses have flaws of their own, says Mr. Higbee, of Eastern Michigan, who uses Reacting to the Past games in his class along with lectures. He has found that attendance on nongame days is typically lower. “You can cover things, but there is tremendous evidence that coverage does not equal learning.”
As the games have been played more widely, a few faculty members have noted that some students are hesitant to embrace their roles, do not understand their characters’ goals, or will simply fail to do the work required. If the pressure to sway their peers does not motivate the students, faculty members have other remedies. They may, for example, kill off a role-playing student’s character.
But, say the method’s advocates, students truly do gain from playing the games, even when they are not polished in their arguments or articulate them poorly.
“They do get better with more practice,” says Lisa Cox, who embraces the method as an adjunct faculty member in the humanities division of Greenfield Community College, in Massachusetts. “If it’s not the blind leading the blind, it’s the nearsighted leading the nearsighted.”
