|
Reacting
to the Past Wins 2004 Hesburgh Award
Eleven Colleges Nationwide Adopt Barnard Program
to Teach Classic Texts
Barnard
Provost Liz Boylan, President Judith Shapiro and Professor
Mark Carnes |
Barnard
has won the 2004 Hesburgh Award for Reacting to the Past,
its innovative first-year seminar program that has been adopted
by 11 colleges nationwide. The program engages college students
in great texts like Plato's Republic and places them
in pivotal historic moments through role-playing. It was viewed
as a national model for excellence in undergraduate teaching
by nine judges with highly distinguished backgrounds in higher
education who reviewed the entries and unanimously selected
Reacting to the Past as the winner.
Research now shows that Reacting, created by Professor
Mark Carnes, produces strong speaking skills and builds empathy
for other cultures and peoples.
Established in 1993 by the TIAA-CREF to recognize faculty
development programs that enhance undergraduate teaching and
learning, the Hesburgh Award is named in honor of Rev. Theodore
M. Hesburgh, president emeritus of the University of Notre
Dame. It includes a $30,000 cash prize.
Barnard President Judith Shapiro accepted the award on March
1 at the annual meeting ot the American Council on Education
in Miami, Fla., joined by Provost Elizabeth Boylan and Professor
Carnes.
"We are truly honored to accept the Hesburgh Award and
proud to be recognized for this creative initiative to help
our students more fully understand civilizations and peoples
far different from their own," said Shapiro, a cultural
anthropologist. "It is exactly this kind of breakthrough
that can and should do so much to renew our fractured world."
Professor
Mark Carnes with Reacting to the Past students |
She
added: "Through his brilliant and innovative work, Mark
Carnes has blazed a new path to help college students engage
with classic texts. And the results speak for themselves.
Reacting to the Past makes students more sophisticated
writers, speakers, and thinkers. Professor Carnes has succeeded
beyond our imagining."
"We are proud to honor Barnard College for its innovation
in undergraduate teaching and its long tradition of excellence
in liberal arts and sciences education for women," said
Herbert M. Allison, Jr., Chairman, President and CEO of TIAA-CREF.
"Our company's service to higher education affords us
the opportunity to recognize the truly innovative work being
done on campuses and in classrooms."
(Judges for the Hesburgh Award include: Dr. David Alexander,
President Emeritus, Pomona College; Dr. Hans Brisch, Chancellor
Emeritus, Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education; Dr.
K. Patricia Cross, Professor of Higher Education, Emerita,
University of California, Berkeley; Dr. Vera King Farris;
President Emerita & Distinguished Professor, The Richard
Stockton College of New Jersey; Dr. Juliet Garcia, President,
University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College,
Dr. Margaret A. Miller, Professor, Curry School of Education,
University of Virginia; Dr. Terry O'Banion, President Emeritus
& Senior League Fellow, League for Innovation in the Community
College; Dr. Kenneth A. Shaw, Chancellor and President, Syracuse
University; Mr. H. Patrick Swygert, President, Howard University.)
The program has expanded from an initial experiment with Athens
in the 5th century B.C. to include a broad range of important
social-historical contexts from Ming China and colonial New
England to the dawn of independence in India.
Barnard breathed new life into its first-year seminar program
and helped 11 other colleges and universities to do so in
the last two years through Reacting by placing students
"in the moment" of history and engaging them in
enthusiastic debate on the ideas of great figures like Socrates,
Rousseau, Gandhi and Galileo. The 12 colleges and universities
that offer Reacting have formed a consortium to share
ideas and results. The program has received substantial funding
from the Fund For the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education
(FIPSE) of the U.S. Department of Education. A study supported
by FIPSE found that students who took Reacting to the Past
classes acquired stronger speaking skills and were more
empathic with different cultures and peoples than those in
control groups.
Discouraged that first-year students seemed bored and put-off
by the conventional Socratic approach to teaching Plato's
Republic, Carnes gathered students in 1996 to find
out why. He determined that it wasn't the material itself
that chafed but student anxiety over saying something foolish
or inappropriate. "Students knew that my knowledge of
Plato exceeded theirs and their disinterest was really masking
a fear of revealing the insufficiency of their understanding,"
he said.
Students were even more anxious, he said, about the reactions
and responses of their peers.
Reacting to the Past changed this by appealing to students'
imagination, and at the same time, challenging them emotionally
and intellectually.
"Instead of being callow novices who feel inferior to
their Socratic inquisitor, namely the professor, students
assume the roles of powerful adults: mighty emperors, influential
scholars, religious zealots," Carnes said. "The
classroom gains an astonishing intensity that spills into
the dorms after class."
Although role-playing is not new to higher education, especially
in political science and government classes (exercises such
as the following are common: "It is 1962. You are the
president and you have been told that the Soviet Union has
sneaked nuclear missiles into Cuba"), Carnes pushed the
concept in a new direction at Barnard, where he is Ann Whitney
Olin Professor of History, alongside his position as General
Editor of the American National Biography.
Carnes introduced the program with an elaborate role-playing
"game" set in Athens in 403 B.C. following its defeat
after the Peloponnesian War. Students are assigned months-long
roles as democrats, oligarchs, and Socratics and support the
classroom role-playing with readings from classic texts outside
class. In the classroom, the professor intervenes only to
clarify the rules.
Five more "games" have been added: Confucianism
and the Succession of the Wanli Emperor, 1587 A.D.; The Trial
of Anne Hutchinson, a Puritan spiritual leader in colonial
Boston; Rousseau, Burke and Revolution in France, 1791; the
Trial of Galileo, and Gandhi and the Indian Subcontinent on
the Eve of Independence. The text and materials will be published
by Longman this spring.
Additional programs are under development, including Patriots
and Loyalists in New York City during the American Revolution,
the crisis of Henry VIII: 1529-1536, and Evolution and the
Kansas Board of Education, 1999.
Professors and administrators from other colleges have learned
about Reacting and played mini-versions of the games
themselves at conferences run by Barnard students who are
veterans of the program.
The Reacting consortium includes Trinity College (Connecticut);
Loras and Dordt Colleges and Drake University (Iowa); the
University of Georgia; Smith College (Massachusetts); Queens
College, Pace University, Queensborough and Westchester Community
Colleges (New York), and the University of Texas at Austin.
The next conferences will be held at the University of Georgia
in Athens, Ga., from April 29-May 2, and then at Barnard from
June 14-17. Barnard alumnae are invited to a conference on
"The Trial of Galileo," from June 19-20 on the Barnard
campus.
The
Reacting to the Past web site
has also been named Website of the Month by the History News
Network. Click here to visit the HNN
review of the site.
Please visit the Reacting website for further information:
www.barnard.edu/Reacting/ or send
email to Professor Carnes at mcarnes@barnard.edu
|
