Reacting to the Past: Looking Forward

This week I started a new unit in both section of my HUM 205: Technology and Human Values.  Last January I attended a training conference on a game-based pedagogy called Reacting to the Past, and I’m ready to give it a try myself.  I think...

Reacting to the Past is a teaching method that uses elaborate role-playing games set at pivotal points in history to allow students to explore the “big ideas” of the humanities.  There are games set during the French Revolution, the trial of Galileo, the struggle for Indian independence and at the Council of Nicea, over twenty in all.  Students take on specific roles and work to achieve individual goals within the context of the game, by researching the issues and making both written and oral arguments to persuade others of their point of view.

My students and I are playing “Rage Against the Machine:Technology, Rebellion and the Industrial Revolution," set in 1817 Manchester, as the advent of factories disrupts the home weaving industry there.  We’ve already spent seven weeks discussing the issues that technology raises in modern society: the paradoxes of isolation and connectivity, the demands of the clock imposed on the rhythms of life, the rise of the individual over the collective.  Now they are being asked to take that new-found understanding and use it to deconstruct, or rather RE-construct, a time and place where crucial attitudes and assumptions about the relationship between man and machines were being developed.  My hope is that by inhabiting the characters and “living” the issues, my students will deepen their awareness of the complex relationship we have with the technology around us.  I’m especially eager that they recognize that this relationship isn’t something imposed upon us by the technology itself, that the machines are not in control. I want them to understand that this relationship is created from the decisions and expectations that we bring to technology.  And in the next four weeks we will play that out, allowing competing needs and desires to determine the outcome of the game.  Will the weavers prevail?  Or will the merchants succeed in establishing factories that destroy the home weaving industry?  Will we allow child labor?  A minimum wage?  What is best for the artisans who come from the working classes but may secretly (or not so secretly) aspire to the middle class?  How will the gentry maintain control in an era of merchant wealth?  And what will the vicars say about all this in their Sunday sermons?

Some students are thrilled.  They are excitedly discussing costumes to wear or Machiavellian plots they’d like to put in motion to win the game.  Others are confused or disconcerted by the requirement to be someone else, to learn by playing a role rather than through a more conventional means.  A few are skeptical.  But almost all are getting into the spirit of the game, which means taking this all very, very seriously.  After all, a game only works if all the players agree, for the duration of that game, to act as if the results have meaning and consequences.  So this scheme will succeed to the extent the students buy into it and are willing to accept that “playful” does not mean “trivial.”

Tuesday	Thursday
Session 1: Introductions of Players and Agenda- Setting – 10/15	Session 2: Wage Negotiations – 10/17
Session 3: Market Day - 10/22	Session 4: Town Hall – 10/24
Session 5: Market Day – 10/29	Session 6: Town Hall – 10/31
Session 7: Market Day / Town Hall – 11-5	Session 8: POST-MORTEM – 11/7

Here is the tentative class schedule.  On "Market Days," everyone meets at the Village Green to buy and sell, settle accounts, socialize and scheme.  Everyone can (and all students are expected to) make short speeches on the topics of the day.  The two newspapers will also be distributed on Market Day, filled with short (500-word) essays that various citizens have submitted for publication.  (Students must write two persuasive essays for publication over the course of the four weeks, arguing for or against a proposed law, advertising a new machine for sale or positions to be filled at the factories, or on any other topic that might concern their characters.)  Town Hall is where laws are passed.  Everyone is free to propose a law, and everyone can and should speak for or against those proposed laws, but only the gentry can vote.

The game will unfold over the next four weeks, ending with a post-mortem on November 7, and I aim to take the 9x9x25 opportunity to write up my impressions several times as we progress through the game.  I’ll keep you posted!