What’s wrong with higher education today?
It’s a question many in the US are asking, and it’s a question Barnard History Professor Mark C. Carnes asks in the first chapter of his book, Minds on Fire: How Role Immersion Games Transform College.
Boring classes (filled with bored students and professors) seem to be one of the reasons Carnes first thought about game playing in the college classroom. In chapter one, aptly titled “All Classes Are Sorta Boring”, Carnes interviews students in his mission to discover what went wrong with a seminar he taught in the fall of 1995. Students were hesitant to answer, until Carnes, with raised voice, blurted out “You were bored! I was bored! You could feel the boredom in the room!”
The student’s response was not what any professor wants to hear: “’Well yes,’ she said. ‘But all classes are sorta boring. Yours was less boring than most.’”
And this sent Carnes on what might best be described a quest to shake up the traditional college classroom. To create classes where, as the numerous examples in this book illustrate, students volunteer to show up early (even to classes scheduled at 8AM), and classes where students are so involved that they lose track of time. Even classes where students organize a baby shower, complete with homemade cake and costumes, for 16th century Queen of England, Anne Boleyn.
Enter Reacting Games, more formally called Reacting to the Past (RTTP), an educational phenomena that has grown so large that it is now organized by a non-profit called the Reacting Consortium, whose mission is: “to promote imagination, inquiry, and engagement as foundational features of teaching and student learning in higher education through the development and dissemination of Reacting to the Past role playing games.”
In Minds on Fire, Carnes details multiple RTTP success stories. Some come from his own history classes, including a game that take places in Athens in 403 B.C.E. and a game called The Trial of Anne Hutchinson. Others come from different universities. The book opens with an RTTP game that took place at Dordt College and focused on the National Assembly of France in 1791. Another example: students at Eastern Michigan University participated in a Reacting game set in 1835 that explored the events that lead to the Trail of Tears.
All the games have similarities, though. In each, students are assigned a role. They become emperors, kings, political figures, victims. They research, analyze, and read about the historical realities of the characters to which they are assigned. As Carnes notes, games are monitored by the Reacting Consortium and have to be approved by the Editorial Board of the Reacting Consortium. Many of the games are published by W. W. Norton, a well-respected publishing house.
When Carnes says “published”, he means it. RTTP is not all fun and, well, games. Carnes uses the term “slogging” to describe students reading through the often 200-page game book that accompanies many of the longer games. In addition, students are asked to think critically, prepare oral commentary, and write papers. Games may be more fun than traditional classroom activities; they don’t appear to be less work, however.
Minds on Fire doesn’t just describe different RTTP games and interview some of the students who participated in the games, however. There’s also research, a lot of research into what works in a classroom, and what doesn’t. The first point—as tempting as it might be—we can’t blame student apathy on the Internet. Carnes notes, for example, that in the 1850s, Henry Adams decided to attend Harvard simply because that’s where his friends where going and that neither he nor any of his friends really paid attention during class.
Another point: research suggests that RTTP games do a lot more than educate students about the past; they also create a sense of community, foster long-term friendships, aid in memory retention, and help create moral leaders. Does RTTP sound too good to be true? Carnes anticipates this concern: “The suggestion that role-immersion games can solve almost all the problems afflicting higher education is so sweeping that most sensible readers will likely dismiss it out of hand. But those who venture beyond the box in any field often discover a landscape that extends beyond anything they had imagined.”
Carnes also points out some issues that have arisen with role immersion: a student who is upset because the game takes up too much of her roommate’s time; a shy student who, at least in the beginning, has trouble participating; the perception that teachers are superfluous in the RTTP world. Still, Carnes might have spent a little more time on the less positive aspects.
That said, Carnes makes RTTP sound fun, innovative, and educational. Is he possibly a little too hard on the “regular” or traditional classrooms? Perhaps. Good things can and do happen in classes that use lecture, class discussion, and other traditional pedagogies, which is important if for no other reason than Carnes notes no student would want to participate in two RTTP games at the same time. Also, even if true, including statements like “we need to make college more like a video game” might not endear some to the RTTP world.
These things, though, are minor critiques of the book rather than RTTP games. Perhaps the most important question is, Does reading Minds on Fire make me wish we would have had Reacting to the Past games when I was in college? Yes, it does.