Developing “You’re History, Pal!”: Employing Role-Playing Games as Pedagogical Instruments

Abstract

With the present paper we aim to explore the way in which two methods of approaching history blend together and are employed in the study of socio-cultural, literary, and historical texts. We posit that the resulting approach allows students to gain superior insight into the cultural contexts explored during Text Analysis Practical Courses, on the one hand, while simultaneously developing their levels of social empathy, on the other. The first of the two methods, Reacting to the Past (RTTP), is an innovative pedagogy pioneered by Mark C. Carnes in the 1990s, designed for university students, which enables them to explore knowledge of the past while putting on the experiential lens of a historical figure or group involved in events that have shaped the course of humanity. As such, through a variety of role playing games, the students essentially take over the classroom, with the instructor’s main objective being to guide and mediate, removing their traditional teaching hat. Within the RTTP framework, the students are provided with the necessary materials, such as workbooks, role sheets, and the like, to truly embody and inhabit the role assigned. In our paper, we will explore the way in which RTTP lends itself to the “bottom-up” approach to history, also called “History from Below” by E. P. Thompson in the 1960s. The principal goal of the latter was to follow the social history of everyday existence and the evolution of common people, thus reducing the bias of the proverbial victor, and improving the accuracy and veracity of historical contexts. Furthermore, it employs an interdisciplinary approach, trying to avoid the reductionist and limitative isolation of material kept in separate containers, in an attempt to avoid cross-contamination, in reality achieving sterility more often than not. Particularly within the larger framework of decolonization and postcolonialism, we can notice a reconsideration of dominant paradigms – our academic interest, thus, becomes fundamentally contiguous with multiperspectivism, as reality unfolds much like a kaleidoscope, with shifting perceptions. It is our goal to assess the abatement of bias through exposure and plurality, both within the university classroom, as well as outside it.