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Reacting to the Past

Reacting to the Past


Reacting to the Past (RTTP) is a series of elaborately designed role-playing games in which students assume historical roles from a famous moment in history and then pursue the goals of their assigned character-in collaboration with some classmates and in opposition to other. Class sessions are run entirely by students, but instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work

The RTTP method teaches skills in research, writing, public speaking, and teamwork and has a proven record of engaging undergraduate students in ways uncommon for American university students. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas and improve intellectual and academic skills.

The RTTP curriculum was pioneered in the late 1990s by Professor of History at Barnard College Mark Carnes, and has been implemented by faculty at over 350 colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad since dissemination began in 2001.

Games last from two to five weeks and are set in the past, but each game also explores multiple additional disciplines.

The RTTP initiative is sustained by the Reacting Consortium (RC), an alliance of colleges, universities, and individual faculty committed to developing and publishing the RTTP series of role playing games for higher education. Through the main program office at Barnard, the Consortium provides programs for faculty development and curricular change, including a regular series of conferences and workshops, online instructor resources, and consulting services. For those interested in developing their own games, the Consortium also has an Editorial Board that provides guidance and oversight during the game development process from concept to official designation and publication.

Part of the intellectual appeal of RTTP is that it transcends disciplinary structures. In addition to games currently published in the RTTP Series by W. W. Norton, it seeks to expand the curriculum by supporting faculty workshops and collaboration on new game designs that explore a variety of historical moments in the humanities and sciences.

Professor of History at Eastern Michigan University (EMU) Mark Higbee is the unpublished co-author and creator of the RTTP game "Fredrick Douglas, Slavery, Abolitionism and The Constitution 1845," and has been using the RTTP pedagogy for eight years.

"I am very involved in it in my own University and at other campuses as well," Higbee said. "(By) supporting people who are trying it out."

The RTTP method began about 15 years ago at Barnard College in New York City, which is very good, private liberal arts college for women and the particular historian there Carnes came up with the idea of creating games that would focus on the conflicts that were already being discussed in the curriculum for the class he was teaching, said Higbee

"The first four or five games were ones that Mark Carnes created. These are small books that can be used at any school that wants them. There's probably thousands of RTTP instructors across the country and relatively few, maybe 30 or 40, reacting games," Higbee said. "Most of which have not been published yet but are still used in class."

Higbee said a major part of creating a reacting game is trial and error which makes the process more interactive.

He read about it around ten years ago during a period where he was looking for more engaging ways of teaching, he said.

"I could tell that most students in most classes were not particularly thrilled to be there," Higbee said. "So I read about (RTTP) in a national publication called The Chronicle of Higher Education I thought, 'Wow this sounds interesting'."

Within a year or two Higbee attended an RTTP workshop during which a group of professors played one of the games over a two day time period.

"I was just totally sold on it. My question was, 'Will it work with EMU students?' And then I tried it with the EMU students and it worked very well," Higbee said. "It's not the solution to everything, but it is a way to turn the classroom into a more of a student focus-RTTP is not about the professors performance (or) how good of a lecture can he or she give, it's about what students can demonstrate that they understand that they have learned and how they react to others."

RTTP was honored with the 2004 Theodore Hesburgh Award for pedagogical innovation.

The project has received developmental support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, Spencer Foundation,National Science Foundation, Teagle Foundation and FIPSE, U.S. Department of Education. RTTP has also been featured in Change magazine, the Chronicle Review, the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Christian Science Monitor and elsewhere.

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