“Reacting to the Past” consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles with “victory objectives” informed by seminal texts in the history of ideas. RTTP was honored with the 2004 Theodore Hesburgh Award (funded by TIAA-CREF) as the nation’s outstanding pedagogical innovation in undergraduate teaching and learning.

Participants will learn about the curriculum by engaging in intensive two-day workshops on particular games, including:
• The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C.
• Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor, 1587
• Patriots, Loyalists & Revolution in New York City, 1775-76
• Rousseau, Burke, and Revolution in France, 1791
• Charles Darwin, the Copley Medal and the Rise of Naturalism, 1861-64
• Greenwich Village, 1913: Suffrage, Labor, and the New Woman (in development)
• The Collapse of Apartheid and Dawn of Democracy in South Africa, 1993 (in development)
• Frederick Douglass, Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Constitution, 1845 (in development)
• Kentucky, 1861: A Nation in the Balance (in development)
• The Second Crusade: The War Council of Acre, 1148 (in development)
• Science Game Development Initiative: “The Trial of Galileo: Aristotelianism, the ‘New Cosmology,’ and the Catholic Church, 1616-33”; "The Pluto Debate, 1999-2006"; and "Climate Change in Copenhagen 2009"

The institute program also includes a series of concurrent sessions where faculty participants engage in discussions about role-playing pedagogy, course development, and liberal education more generally. We also invite individual faculty and teams to propose topics for concurrent sessions.

For further information, visit http://reacting.barnard.edu/2012-institute or email reacting@barnard.edu. The early registration deadline is March 31, 2012.