Getting into History by Getting into Character
Natasha Gill's classroom crackles with tension. Sixteen Barnard and Columbia College students debate a 1790 law turning priests into employees of the revolutionary French government. Each student clutches a copy of Rousseau's ''Social Contract'' and struggles to make a persuasive case with eloquence, apt quotation and chutzpah.
Assigned to competing factions, the students are participants in a ''Reacting to the Past'' seminar, which thrusts them into scenarios that reanimate historic issues and classic texts.
As ''gamemaster,'' Professor Gill interrupts with a ''news bulletin.'' The poor of Paris are in revolt. Representatives of the crowd are permitted to address the National Assembly. ''You have denied the voice of the people,'' shouts Dani Holz. ''No one here, not even the Jacobins, represents us.''
Soon several students stage a ''riot.''
The moment marked a high point in the seminar using the ''Reacting'' technique, which was developed by Mark Carnes, a Barnard history professor. Commenting on this confrontation, he said: ''The rules of Reacting create an illusion of freedom while binding students to the contingencies of the past. They may chafe at this, but eventually they learn to think and act within those constraints.'' He has been developing these scenarios and their complex rules for nearly a decade, and the method has begun to attract national attention.
Last week more than 50 faculty members and administrators from 18 institutions attended Barnard's fourth ''Reacting to the Past'' conference to try out abbreviated versions of several games. In early May, a regional conference was held at the University of Georgia campus in Athens.
Professor Gill's students were taking part on a recent Monday in a game called ''Rousseau, Burke and Revolution in France.'' They supplement Rousseau with a thick text outlining the chronology of the French Revolution and delineating game roles and strategies for victory. The text also includes a class schedule, reading list, primary documents and guidelines for written and oral work.