Last night, a student told me, "You know why I liked giving speeches in
your class? I got to do it being someone else." She explained
that she'd been required to give a speech this week in another class, and found
it to be a terribly nerve-wracking experience. But she hadn't had that
reaction giving her speeches as part of the Reacting to the Past game.
Playing the role of Robert Owen,
arguing for workers’ rights and against child labor, she was eager to speak and
passionate about promoting her causes, even fearless in countering the
arguments of others. Because she was playing a role. Playing.
And there, in a word, is the strength and power of the Reacting to the Past
pedagogy. A role-playing game allows you to be someone else, to take on a
different persona for a while. And that can be incredibly
liberating. Lee
Sheldon, a screenwriter, game designer and professor of media studies, has written extensively about using the
structure and mechanics of role-playing games to enhance learning, most notably
in The
Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game. Jane McGonigal and James Paul Gee are two
others who have explored how the mechanics of games can motivate learners. Essentially, it’s less scary to take a risk
if it isn’t “really” you stepping out on a ledge. But the learning that is taking place, the
skills that are developed and the experiences that students have: that’s all
them. They’ll take that with them even
as they leave their temporary persona behind.
So, it worked! So well that some
students argued vociferously to extend the game past the four weeks
scheduled. In the end, we didn’t do that,
because we’d addressed all the issues I set out to explore and I didn’t want
the playacting to become the sole reason for the game. But it’s clear that the playacting was an effective
element of the game’s ultimate purpose. In
my first
post on this topic, looking forward to a game not yet played, I wrote that
the experiment would fail or succeed on whether students agree to accept the
game elements of their activities. They would have to agree that, within
the confines of the class, the consequences of their decisions and actions
mattered and collectively agree to "let's pretend." I saw
evidence all the way through the game/class of that sincere commitment. My
student's comment to me last night was just icing on the cake.
