Can You Beat Churchill?: Teaching History through Simulations
Michael A. Barnhart
Abstract
How do you get students to engage in a historical episode or era? How do you bring the immediacy and contingency of history to life? This book shares the secret to award-winning success in the classroom, which encourages role-playing for immersive teaching and learning. Combating the declining enrollment in humanities classes, this innovative approach reminds us how critical learning skills are transmitted to students: by reactivating their curiosity and problem-solving abilities. The book provides advice and procedures, both for the use of off-the-shelf commercial simulations and for the inst ... More
How do you get students to engage in a historical episode or era? How do you bring the immediacy and contingency of history to life? This book shares the secret to award-winning success in the classroom, which encourages role-playing for immersive teaching and learning. Combating the declining enrollment in humanities classes, this innovative approach reminds us how critical learning skills are transmitted to students: by reactivating their curiosity and problem-solving abilities. The book provides advice and procedures, both for the use of off-the-shelf commercial simulations and for the instructor who wishes to custom design a simulation from scratch. These reenactments allow students to step into the past, requiring them to think and act in ways historical figures might have. Students must make crucial or dramatic decisions, though these decisions need not align with the historical record. In doing so, they learn, through action and strategic consideration, the impact of real individuals and groups of people on the course of history. There is a quiet revolution underway in how history is taught to undergraduates. This book hopes to make it a noisy one.
Keywords:
role-playing,
classroom teaching,
humanities,
critical learning skills,
problem-solving,
curiosity,
students,
teaching simulations
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2021 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501755644 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: January 2022 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501755644.001.0001 |
