“Reacting to the Past” to be Proactive in the Present: Feminist Roots of High-Impact Practices

To longtime feminist instructors, the latest academic buzz phrase, “high-impact practices,” may seem like a self-important guest arriving late to the pedagogical party. After all, women’s studies classrooms have employed student-centered, high-impact practices for many decades. To cite just one well-known example, in 1989 bell hooks called for an “engaged pedagogy,” envisioning education, inspired by Paolo Freire, as “the practice of freedom” (83). hooks’s elaboration of this pedagogy (and the myriad scholars who for decades have developed nuanced practices of feminist pedagogy) anticipates currently touted “high-impact practices” (HIPs) and offers an opportunity for feminist instructors to share with colleagues and students the long tradition of these methods in feminist classrooms and their relation to current HIPs, as well as their effectiveness in inviting students to move from theory to action and to persist and succeed on our campuses and beyond.

In this article, I will explain briefly a high-impact role-playing pedagogy developed at Barnard College called “Reacting to the Past” (hereafter, Reacting), which I use to introduce first-year and general education students to feminist history, current feminist issues, and feminist pedagogy. On many campuses, we are being called to design first-year seminars or first-year experience courses that meet the LEAP initiative (“Liberal Education and America’s Promise”) to use innovative high-impact strategies, particularly with new students, to boost our retention and graduation rates. I argue here that feminist approaches and content effectively anticipate and enrich these initiatives, and, when used in first-year general education courses, can become what I like to call a stealth introduction to women’s and gender studies. The current pedagogical climate, then, offers a chance for feminist instructors effectively to introduce first-year (or general education-course) students to concepts and methods that can build our majors and minors and can strengthen feminist intellectual work on our campuses and communities.

Let me first offer a quick definition of “high-impact learning practices” (HIPs), drawing on the work of George Kuh, whose 2008 book with Carol Geary Schneider on this topic is foundational. They list practices such as learning communities, writing-intensive courses, collaborative projects, and community-based learning among the “purposeful learning experiences that have been shown to deepen student learning and engagement, raise levels of performance, retention and success for students, and that invoke intellectually engaging and effective educational practices” (“High-Impact”). There is evidence (see the LEAP report) that HIPs can lead to positive outcomes (both academic and personal), both for the general population of students, as well as underserved, underrepresented, and first-generation college students. Where I teach, at a regional campus of a large public university with mostly commuting and many nontraditional students (particularly in our WGS program), these practices increasingly are valued by administration as essential to student success. We know from the students in our major and minor that engaged pedagogy empowers students to be problem-solvers and coalition-builders who can apply concepts to create change beyond the classroom, as I will discuss below.

Influenced by bell hooks (who builds on the work of Paolo Freire and Thich Nhat Hanh), and synthesizing theorists such as Carolyn M. Shrewsbury, my classrooms have long been student-centered. When my dean (Elizabeth Dunn, a professor of history who is a founding member of the Reacting community) asked me to design a new course that would meet our “Literary and Intellectual Traditions” general education requirement and would use a Reacting role-playing pedagogy, I was nervous, but inspired by hooks’s call for pedagogy to transform teachers, as well as students (54). Reacting pedagogy was started in 1990 at Barnard College by history professor Mark Carnes, and now over forty colleges and universities use this interactive pedagogy. Reacting courses use complex role-playing games to bring to life important contested moments in history (for example, the trials of Galileo or Anne Hutchinson, the French Revolution, Darwin and the Royal Society, and more contemporary games about topics like the Kansas school board and creationism, and STEM debates...