A description of the use of roleplaying and games to strengthen rhetorical skills and intensify the stakes of argumentation and persuasion. Rebecca Stanton outlines ways that Reacting to the Past modules in a First Year Seminar helped her students to engage more deeply with source material, undertake motivated research, and craft and refine arguments pitched directly to peers.

1. Inhabiting arguments:
Roleplaying games in the classroom
Rebecca Stanton
ITSI 2016

2. What is Reacting to the Past?
Reacting to the Past (RTTP) 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.
(http://reacting.barnard.edu/about)

3. What is Reacting to the Past?
Reacting to the Past (RTTP) 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.
(http://reacting.barnard.edu/about)

4. Three major ingredients:
• Game (decision point, controversy, crisis,
debate, argument, rhetoric, strategy,
liminality)
• History (research, understanding the past)
• Text (interpreting a document, reading
closely, “learning to look”)

5. Why RTTP?
Intended outcomes:
• Building arguments:
– Logic
– Rhetoric
• Giving students a real stake
– Audience
– Consequences
• Encouraging participation
– Fun
– Competition
– Point of entry

6. Let’s try it:
The Master said, “There are, are
there not, young plants that fail to
produce blossoms, and blossoms
that fail to produce fruit?”
 Confucius, Analects (Lun yü) IX.22
(trans. D.C. Lau)

7. Another example:
As long as several men assembled together consider themselves as a
single body, they have only one will which is directed towards their
common preservation and general well-being. Then, all the animating
forces of the state are vigorous and simple, and its principles are clear and
luminous; it has no incompatible or conflicting interests; the common
good makes itself so manifestly evident that only common sense is
needed to discern it. . . .
However, when the social tie begins to slacken and the state to weaken,
when particular interests begin to make themselves felt and sectional
societies begin to exert an influence over the greater society, the common
interest then becomes corrupted and meets opposition, voting is no
longer unanimous; the general will is no longer the will of all;
contradictions and disputes arises, and even the best opinion is not
allowed to prevail unchallenged. . . .
For this reason the sensible rule for regulating public assemblies is one
intended not so much to uphold the general will there, as to ensure that it
is always questioned and always responds.
 Rousseau, Of the Social Contract, IV.1 (trans Maurice Cranston)

8. Video!
• Rousseau, Burke, and Revolution in France,
1791: https://youtu.be/welSO3Ig8_c?t=209
• Defining a Nation: India on the Eve of
Independence, 1945
https://youtu.be/_U6L9ERzw0U?t=81

9. Unintended (good) outcomes
• Students embody multiplicity of interpretation
• Students inhabit unfamiliar perspectives
• Students pore over history
• Students happily engage in small-group work
• Students bond (for life?!)
• Students experience frustration and adversity
in ways that are not directly connected to
their grade

10. Unintended (not so good) outcomes
• Students can get carried away by game elements
and forget to anchor arguments in research and
in text
– Counter with:
• Responsible research
• Information literacy
• Counterfactual outcomes
– Counter with:
• Die rolls
• Behind-scenes guidance
• Postmortem

11. Grading
(?!)