A Conversation with Mark Carnes, Professor of History at Barnard College and Creator of Reacting to the Past

This issue's Teachers Talk is in three parts. The first part is our conversation with Mark Carnes, creator of Reacting to the Past (RTTP). The second part is a student reflection about RTTP, written by Courtney Klaus, who attends Newman University in Kansas and has participated in several RTTP games. The third part is Jason D. Martinek's experience using RTTP in his course "Progressivism" at New Jersey City University.

Carnes joined the History Department at Barnard College in 1982. He has published Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (1989) and coauthored the popular American history textbook, American Nation: A History of the United States, now in its 15th edition. In addition, he served as general editor of the American National Biography (1999). It has been nearly twenty-five years since he first developed the concept of RTTP.

The RTTP website explains its goals this way:

Reacting to the Past consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills. Reacting roles, unlike those in a play, do not have a fixed script and outcome, so while students will be obliged to adhere to the philosophical and intellectual beliefs of the historical figures they have been assigned to play, they must devise their own means of expressing those ideas persuasively, in papers, speeches, or other public presentations; and students must also pursue a course of action they think will help them win the game.¹

RTTP is now used in hundreds of classes around the country. In 2014 Carnes examined the educational value of these games in Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College, published by Harvard University Press. There are now over twenty published RTTP games and more than 100 in development. I met with Carnes in late July, where we talked about the origins of RTTP and how it has transformed the college classroom.

As you will see from the conversation, Carnes's main goal in developing RTTP was to move away from a traditional lecture format in his classes. As readers of Transformations know, this model emerged from pivotal pedagogical scholarship by Paolo Friere (in Pedagogy of the Oppressed [1970]) and bell hooks (notably Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center [1984] and Teaching to Transgress [1994]) among many others. RTTP's emphasis on decentering the instructor is a hallmark of feminist approaches to teaching that are intended to encourage students to view their perspectives and their experiences as central to the processes of learning. RTTP is thus part of the political work of reconfiguring power dynamics within the classroom through inclusive pedagogical practices.

Part 1: The Conversation

jason martinek:

How did you come up with the idea of Reacting to the Past?

mark carnes:

I was at a point where I had achieved many of my career goals—tenure at Columbia University, chair of the History Department at Barnard College—and yet I noticed that my students were bored. I was, too. I couldn't imagine doing things the same way for the next twenty-five years of my life. So in the fall of 1995 I took the materials for my first-year seminar and I reconfigured them as debates on important texts. But during the second set of debates, set in Ming China, something happened that I had not expected. Two bold students seized control of the class—and a powerful, new classroom dynamic emerged. That was the origin of RTTP, but it took years to develop.

That debate, which later became Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor, focused on the crisis that was created when the emperor named his third son by his favorite concubine as heir. That's a profound violation of...