Ian McNeely shows how new teaching method helps students

Ian McNeely has been introducing students and faculty to an innovative game-based teaching method for several years now. But thanks to coverage in The Chronicle of Higher Education, he recently brought it to a much wider audience.

McNeely, associate dean for undergraduate education in the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of history, was featured in a July 21 story on Reacting to the Past, a role-playing teaching method that immerses students in their subject matter. McNeely has been a facilitator and advocate for the program since hearing about it from former UO President Richard Lariviere.

“It’s not just a game,” McNeely said. “It’s a game that enhances learning and engagement.”

Based in Washington, D.C., The Chronicle describes itself as the No. 1 source of news, information and jobs for college and university faculty and administrators. Its audited website traffic is more than 12.8 million pages a month, seen by more than 1.9 million unique visitors; the newspaper has a total readership of more than 315,000.

The Chronicle story stemmed from McNeely’s participation in a June seminar at Barnard College, the birthplace of Reacting to the Past. He served as a “game master,” the facilitator who runs the game and, in this case, introduces faculty to the teaching method.

One of the participants was James Lang, an English professor and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. Lang is writing a series of columns on Reacting to the Past for The Chronicle and featured McNeely’s class in his first report.

In the classroom, students taking Reacting to the Past assume the roles of people involved in important events in history, such as the formation of an independent India, the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the trial of Galileo. They take part in debates, write papers and try to organize and influence support for the positions of the characters they play.

To carry out their roles and succeed in the game, students must pore over their texts, source material and historical accounts, McNeely said. That results in the much deeper understanding and connection to the material that is the hallmark of Reacting to the Past.

“It creates this amazingly deep emotional engagement that you get when you play the role of someone else in history,” McNeely said. “And that emotional involvement gets stirred back into very intense reading and writing. It forces students to go back to the texts and really internalize them.”

Students have to stick to the role their characters played in history, but they aren’t locked into the same outcome. McNeely said the class is flexible enough that a student who is on top of the material and who can make persuasive arguments could help produce an outcome different from what actually happened, which is one of the features that makes the classes so compelling.

“What makes it fun is it doesn’t have to happen like it did in real life,” McNeely said.

Reacting to the Past is now a required course for all UO freshmen in the College Scholars program and classes are taught about five times a year. The courses get rave reviews from the students who take them, McNeely said.

The program is being used at dozens of institutions, mostly on the East Coast and in the Midwest. But McNeely is hoping to bring it to more West Coast schools by hosting a regional conference at the UO Nov. 7-9.

About 50 faculty members and graduate students from around the region are expected to take part in workshops that will teach the teachers, with room for about a dozen participants from the UO. The conference will feature a keynote address by Barnard College historian Mark Carnes, who created the program.

“This will be a kind of beachhead for the Pacific Northwest,” McNeely said. “The program consortium is looking to this conference to put the UO and Reacting to the Past on the map in this part of the country.”

―By Greg Bolt, Public Affairs Communications