Second Reacting to the Past Training Conference to be Held at Trinity College, October 5-6

New York, NY, September 27, 2002 – A second training conference for Reacting to the Past, an innovative first year program in which students take on the personae of characters in history invented by Barnard History Professor Mark Carnes, will take place at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, from October 5 through 6, 2002. Faculty members from six colleges and universities across the country, including Barnard, will participate in the training.

The conference at Trinity follows in the footsteps of a Reacting to the Past training seminar held at Barnard in late July, in which professors and students from Barnard, Trinity, Smith, Queens College, Loras College, Queensborough Community College, and Pace University gathered to learn how to play and design Reacting games. Faculty and student representatives from each of these same schools will reconvene at Trinity for a second training opportunity. Each school represented at these conferences is planning to implement or already has implemented customized versions of Reacting to the Past.

The pedagogy behind Reacting to the Past, which received a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education grant from the U.S. Department of Education, relies exclusively on role-playing to facilitate a student’s exploration of cultures, controversies, and moments of historical importance. The instructor does not participate in the games and is present mainly to ensure the historical credibility of the discussions. This eliminates the instructor as the primary source of information and allows the students to explore for themselves the issues at hand. Students are assigned roles for the month-long games.

Since Reacting’s official inception into Barnard’s First Year Seminar Program in 1999, Carnes and his colleagues have created such games as "Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Empire;" "The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 BC;" "The Trial of Anne Hutchinson, 1637;" "Rousseau, Burke and Revolution in France, 1791;" "Hindu and Muslim Nationalism, Gandhi, and the Making of a Nation on the Eve of Independence in India, 1945;" and "Freud, Jung and the Nature of the Unconscious."

Student and faculty participants at the July training conference were quite complimentary about Reacting to the Past.

"You have to think on two levels," said Smith junior Ariadne Nevin. "First, you have to be in the game, be part of the game. But then you have to be constantly thinking about and working with ideas you don’t quite understand."

"It’s interesting," said Dan Gardner, Professor of Chinese History at Smith College. "It’s different from traditional teaching and learning. It puts students inside a character and teaches them that ideas are not just ideas; they get enacted in the world."

Barnard student participants at the Trinity training session will include Dana Johnson ’04, Nicki Thompson ’03, Anna Stevenson ’04 and Rachel Wilch ’03. Participants from Barnard’s faculty will include Spanish senior lecturer Flora Shiminovich, Patricia Stokes of the Psychology Department, women’s studies term assistant professor and Associate Director of The Forum on Migration and Lectures Toni Sethi, and Anene Ejikeme, Director of Pan-African Studies.

To see a video of a Reacting to the Past game in action, visit the Reacting page on the Barnard Electronic Archive and Teaching Laboratory web site.

Contact: Petra Tuomi, Office of Public Affairs, 212-854-7907