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Explore how students grapple with historical events and figures to understand their distinctness and uniqueness. In this episode of Heterodox Out Loud, host John Tomasi interviews Professor Mark Carnes of Barnard College. Professor Carnes talks about his innovative approach to teaching history, which he calls "reacting to the past." He explains how this method challenges traditional teaching by immersing students in historical contexts through Live-Action Role-Playing (LARP).

Professor Carnes shares the components of this approach, its impact on students' engagement, the complexity of character roles, and the unique insights it generates. By making history come alive in a way that traditional teaching methods may not achieve, "reacting to the past" provides a unique and engaging way to learn about the past.

Mark Carnes received his B.A. from Harvard and Ph.D. from Columbia. For the first half of his career, he was a very conventional historian, General Editor of the 17-million-word American National Biography (Oxford), and author or editor of dozens of books on American history. But around the turn of the century, he pioneered the Reacting to the Past program, where students played complex games set in the past, their roles informed by important texts. He has co-authored six games in the Reacting series, published by the University of North Carolina Press, and is the author of Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College (Harvard, 2014). He teaches at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Mark Carnes, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Mark Carnes: Nice to be here.

John Tomasi: It's a pleasure to have you. Did you take the train down?

Mark Carnes: I did indeed today.

John Tomasi: That's one of the pleasures of being in New York. We have gems all around the city. So, it's nice to have you.

Mark Carnes: Nice to be connected with you. Great to come.

John Tomasi: You've been teaching history in an interesting way. And I understand that you sort of came across this approach teaching history almost as a discovery. Can you just tell us about how you came across this new way of thinking about things?

Mark Carnes: Yeah, I had a very traditional professional background. And I was at a point in my career, I'd gotten tenure at Columbia. I had sort of achieved one of my main goals. And I chaired my department at Barnard and sort of grabbed all of the sort of brass rings. But I was looking ahead at the rest of my profession. And I had a class to teach one afternoon. And I didn't want to go to it. And I remember trudging across the walk. This was at Barnard. And thinking, what's wrong? I'm a good teacher. I finally, after 20 years, I finally figured things out. And I know the stuff. I'm a good teacher. I'm dealing, I'm teaching the best, some of the best students in the nation. And I was teaching the classic texts of the human imagination. So great texts, a seminar class, good students, and a good teacher. And yet I dreaded the class. Okay, got to class. And some students straggled in after me, sitting way at the other end of the table and went through the class. And that sense of, how can this be, just plagued me. And so at the end of that semester, I asked all the students to come and meet with me individually the next semester, just because I wanted to figure out what went wrong. And so most of the students did come. And I met with them. And after the third student told me that that had been her favorite class, I said, how can that be? I was bored. You were bored. You could feel the boredom in the room. And she looked up at my books. She thought a bit and she said, well, yeah, but all classes are sort of boring. Yours was less boring than most. And at that moment, there was a flash of cognition of my undergraduate years. All classes were sort of boring. I skipped a whole lot of them. And so that bothered me. So I decided to shake up this seminar the next year and turn it into a series of debates. Turn the seminar into debates. Yeah, around text. So there'd be text and there'd be a big debate about it. And the first debate was basically Plato's Republic as a trial of Socrates. And it created a sort of artificial debate. And it was fine. The second debate was on the Analects. But I said it in the Ming Dynasty during the reign of the Wanli Emperor. And one student was the emperor and the other was the first grand secretary. And there is a very important debate within the secretary over the interpretation of the Analects. And the emperor has basically life and death control over everyone in the realm. But there are a group of other Confucian scholars who were trying to nudge the emperor not to do what the emperor wanted, which was to name his third born son by his favorite concubine, his successor, instead of his oldest son, which is a violation. So anyway, it was just a debate on that stuff. And the students who were playing the emperor and the first grand secretary, we had the first debate. They came, and I thought it was fine, came up to me afterwards. And that wouldn't have been like it was in Ming China. They were cracking jokes and they're making fun. That wouldn't have happened. And I said, so part of Confucian's idea was that you can induce psychological states through rituals. And they said, you know, you might, why don't you study Ming rituals? And they said, you mean make them bow to the emperor, to the student? I said, well, you know, you can do whatever you want as long as it's accords with Ming rituals. The next class, sorry to give you a long story, but the next class, they came back with, and the emperor announced that their whole series of new, the first grand secretary announced their whole series of new rituals and that the class would have to stand. They, could never look directly at the emperor. They, a student suggested this. This is the first grand secretary. These are the new rules that accorded with Ming ritual. They, there would be no jokes and no side of conversations. And then she said, and if anyone violates these rules, you'll be out of the room. And because your grade depends on class participation, your grade will suffer. I said, wait a minute. Students said, she can't do that. I never known it. and I said, of course he can. He's the emperor. So what happened was when the student comes back in, begins to act like an emperor and the students say, you're going to cut this off, aren't you? And I was just bewildered because they're acting like a totalitarian ruler. And which was right. I let that go on. And as that happened, the dynamics in the room shifted from me to the students and the debate, which had been, good in the, in the, in the, you know, the trial of soccer sort of thing, but it now took on different tone, certainly more intense stone. The next class, I moved my desk away from my, my chair away from the, from the, table. The students didn't notice. And as I removed myself from the conversation, the debates became more and more heated and more intense. At the end of the class, one student said, did anyone realize this class was supposed to end seven minutes ago? And we'd all sort of gotten lost. And I realized at that moment that if students could run the class, that there would be some dynamic that would be powerful. The problem is students don't know anything. So how can they run a class? So, so that led to the idea of reacting, which was to create a structure, embed the content, the historical content, and the ideas and the texts within the structure, say a mansion, and then push students into inhabit it through gameplay, through competition, through this, through, through make-believe. And they're inhabiting the structure will cause them to learn it. And that became the basis of reacting, the past. And I didn't come across that insight immediately, but it was a process over a few years.

John Tomasi: So reacting, that led to this concept that, that, of creating these elaborate simulations, you could call them. And you, and this, and the system you, you've developed, we'll describe, we'll, we'll, we'll discuss how it's grown and the movement that you've built around it. You call it Reacting to the Past. And the idea is that people, it's a way of teaching history through games or through role-playing. How would you say it?

Mark Carnes: No, I, it, both are right. it, it's, I didn't know it at the time, but now because we called a LARP live action role-playing game. but it is a game. We have dice. We've learned that the more sort of gaming elements that you include in it, that, that sort of replicate historical, elements, the better and more fun it is. but, yeah, so that's, that's sort of the, it's, it's, it's a game. And I think it's important that be a game, that it'd be fun because students are putting themselves in difficult situations and we're demanding a lot more of them. So it's, it needs to be a fun situation.

John Tomasi: And as you know, I, I visited one of your classes and saw this in play and was, had a role myself that we'll talk about in a few moments, but just, just first about Reacting to the Past, the concept and that kind of structure you've been building for this way of teaching. You have these components you have now for all these different units in history. Sometimes though, you know, as I understand last one week, sometimes they last or often they last for months, perhaps a semester and it involves a student game book.

Mark Carnes: Yeah.

John Tomasi: So, but what are the components within the reacting, module?

Mark Carnes: So the, it's, it's had three components. The first part is an 80 to 90,000 word game book. And the game books are published by the University of North Carolina Press. We've got 34 or 35 published games.

John Tomasi: That's a lot of significant game book.

Mark Carnes: Yes. 80, 80, 90,000 words. Then there are role sheets, which is for each student role. I mean, we don't publish, we don't make those public because the role sometimes often include secrets and things that, that we don't. So faculty download the role sheets from the reacting consortium website. and then they also download the instructor's manual. The role sheets for some games are hundreds of thousands of words long.

John Tomasi: When you say they include secrets, what do you mean?

Mark Carnes: Well, sometimes historical figures say they want this, but they really want something else. So the role sheet will include the various secrets or the various strategies that are at their disposal.

John Tomasi: And so the students are preparing for this class by reading the, the game book. The game book, which is going to include thick historical facts about what's going on. Historical essay and then some textual sources that they will need for writing their papers. And then are they each being given one or more than one role sheet of a particular character?

Mark Carnes: They'll get a role sheet when the role sheet could, could range from, from one page to 20 or 30 pages for a single role sheet.

John Tomasi: So how much time do students put into preparing for these, this kind of a class compared to a regular history class?

Mark Carnes: What happens ideally is that they will get lost in the game and it will become their life. And this happens often enough that, that, the, I remember, Bill Offutt at Pace University mentioned that, that when he was teaching, reacting to a class and other faculty at Pace were teaching, reacting, and there was a learning community in a dorm. And so there was multiple classes playing the same game and the dorm became obsessed with it, except some of the students weren't in the game. And so the RA contacted the instructors and said, students who are playing, reacting are just obsessed with it. And that's all they talk about. It's driving everybody. It's crazy. Can you shut them up? So, so the idea is that you hope that some of the students or all of the students will just get lost in these worlds, lost in exploring these ideas and the fun of it, the competition of it. Exploring the historical period, exploring the ideas that they, I mean, the periods are most fun when they're set at moments where ideas are in collision. And that's one of my fights with the, the people who are teaching great books, courses, just by talking about the texts themselves. The texts gain power when people, you know, lived and died over them. And we just look at the texts and take them out of the historical context. We, it, we sap them of, of the passion that makes them so important. And to, to, to look at them from, from, from, from the vantage point of people who were, would really fight and live and die over the meanings of those texts is to embed them with the, the, the clout that makes them come alive.

John Tomasi: And I just share with you that I studied as an undergraduate at St. John's College. Well, you're the, and, and we would occasionally say, so what's the historical context of this Herodotus or what's going on in the, or of, of the pile of Socrates, for example, which we'd read Thucydides. We knew some of the context, but actually putting it together into a historical context, the pieces together, the pieces were all there, but the, the role the students were being asked to play was very much one of study this text as a text. So you're, you're doing it, you're doing it. What really strikes me about what you're doing is that you seem to be, have discovered a way to make serious historical scholarship available and alive to undergraduates. Rather than reading it from a distance from sitting in our chair with a professor up front. Would you say that that way or how do you, how do you understand?

Mark Carnes: But in a way though, it, it's more liberating than that because historical scholarship has its, its, its, its pathways and at ease and flows. And we sort of know where we are at this point in any particular historical field, but students might take it in an entirely different direction. Cause they get hung up on a particular issue and, and, and, and they'll go on a different issue. And often it's, it's a journey of discovery for the instructor who's never looked at that thing. I was, I remember doing a faculty training workshop with some classicists and one classicist that I think was at Michigan State University after the game unfolded and unfolded in an unusual way. And he said, he said, my God, it could have happened that way could have happened. And I've never thought of that possibility. And some faculty have taken the insights that have been generated from the, the odd directions the game may take to, to undertake new scholarship. So there's a problem within the profession that we tend to direct our students towards the contemporary preoccupations of the profession. And the game sort of loosen that up and we'll go, go, go in different directions.

John Tomasi: Yeah. Some disciplines read history to draw universal lessons, but some, I mean, Gordon Wood, a colleague at Brown once said to me that history is about saying why every unit, every episode is unique and different. That's what makes history as a discipline different than a lot of, for example, political science looks at historical episodes to draw lessons for the contemporary world. Whereas history is something about coming to understand the distinctness of that moment. Is that, is that sound right or is that?

Mark Carnes: Well, it, but I go one step further, which is that, that every historian and every generation is going to look at that moment in a different way. Which is why history is so, so alive. What we find in the past that's meaningful to us, that speaks to us changes. And so the, the specialness of the moment is one thing, but, the moments, the moments change. And we, we've, we've got a hold of, sort of humility towards our own moments of ingenuity and discovery. Eureka, I found the real truth about this historical moment. Well, no, it's a different truth is going to emerge in 20 years and they're going to make fun of what we've done now, or at least maybe they'll be respectful.

John Tomasi: But, so you recently invited me to, hop on the subway and go north up to Barnard where I, had the really great privilege of sitting in on one of your classes. It was a class of maybe, I'm going to say 16, 19 students, 19 students, Barnard students, all women. and the, the class I visited was a part of a unit you were doing on the, and that was 19, 1945, regarding the British transfer of power and a question that gathered together, as you know, they, as you, they gathered together the, the Indian national Congress, the Muslim league, the Sikhs, communists, village leaders, various different groups.

Mark Carnes: It's just one of the greatest, one of the greatest gathering of, thinkers the world has ever seen, you know, just this, for one reason, these, these folks that spend lots of time in British prisons where they had plenty of time to write. And so they've just wrote lots of books and like, so I'm sorry. So yeah, it's just, it's just a great, it's, it's just an extraordinary moment, in, in, in history of, of intellectuals, well-published intellectuals coming together to try to figure out what to do next.

John Tomasi: And so that, that class and game, there was a game element involved in rolling dice that I was in the room, but we'll get to that in a moment too. that, that was part of a semester long course. What was the topic of that course?

Mark Carnes: It was just, it's just, it's just, the program is Reacting to the Past and it was just, two big games in the reacting pantheon. One, the first game was set in Athens in 403 BCE after Athens is the last Peloponnesian war. And then this big game.

John Tomasi: I see.

Mark Carnes: So they played that game, the game that I sat in on for one class, they've been playing, they played that game for a total of half the semester. They'd done it. They'd had, four setup sessions and they'd played three game sessions and they'd all written at least one paper at that point.

John Tomasi: And you'll write, you'll write papers to support what you're saying in the class. Does it write the paper from the perspective of their character?

Mark Carnes: Oh yes, yes, yes.

John Tomasi: So you're all in on this.

Mark Carnes: Oh, absolutely. We don't want them to pull out of their role. We want them to stay in the role and their job is to win the game according to the victory objectives of their character.

John Tomasi: Can you say a little bit more about the sense in which this experience in the classroom is a game? So they come in, they've been given, some shared historical documents that they've read, historical context. They've also been given some primary texts that they can read. They've also been assigned, each of them now individually has been assigned some character. In some cases, more than one character. As I recall, there was more than one Gandhi because there was some question.

Mark Carnes: Gandhi is a very complicated, one of the design elements is that Gandhi has a persona as an apostle of nonviolence that we're all familiar with. but he was also, in many ways supporting, Hindu religious beliefs and anti-modernism, which were somewhat and times would collide with his nonviolent philosophy. So we have students representing different poles of his thought. Sometimes they join together and when they do, they've got special powers and sometimes they don't. So it's, it, it's, it's an unusual design element, that you picked up on. So good, very, very impressive.

John Tomasi: So, so I entered into, I sat into this, in this classroom, I'd been assigned a role. I was to be a reporter for the, I was to be a reporter for the Hindustan Times. No, I'm sorry. I was a reporter for the, yeah, I think so. Yeah. And, much less deeply in my role than everyone else in the room, which was really clear. You were the, you were the, games master, I suppose.

Mark Carnes: Games master, right, right. Anything like that.

John Tomasi: and, and these students were clearly deeply in their role and they're very serious about settling into their seats. I was really struck by the way they sat in and I sort of watched some of these young women sit there and kind of, as I thought, enter into that role now, because this thing is going to be going in a serious way. And then one of the things that really struck me was that you, as the professor, you didn't say much. You sort of, sort of like, you know, you didn't hit a gong and say go, but something like that started to happen. I think it started to happen. I think they couldn't wait to go and they just started going. And there was a flow in the room. That's hard for me to describe, but maybe you can describe it, that eventually involved people rolling dice, die at one point. What, what, what, what was going on?

Mark Carnes: So, so, so what happens is that the students have got objectives and members of the Muslim league, they've got special objectives, but then all of the Muslim league want, wanted to have partition, partition, and the Indian National Congress wants to avoid partition. They've got a whole bunch of different goals. So England's just the context, England is giving up their large, that they're leaving their largest colony. Well, they've got to decide whether to do that. And so there are the, the, one of the things that happens during the game is there's an election in Britain and the Labour Party, Clement Attlee wins and Churchill is kicked out. And so when Clement Attlee comes in, Britain no longer wants to hold this expensive, fractious colony. And so, so the game master tells the governor, British governor's general that you no longer have the option of retaining India as a colony, but that's a secret. That's a sort of, the sort of thing that, so there are a number of sort of secret elements are going on. So different students. And then, of course, they're the Indian princes who've got their own goals. They want to hold on to their principalities and the communist party wants to, to, to do its stuff. And so there are all these different things, victory objectives that are flowing together in, in complex ways that no game master can orchestrate. So they just happen or they don't. When they don't happen, then those voices, falter and the game master should nudge that voice forward. And if the student fails, then that voice will fail and the student will lose the game and it'll, you know, feel badly.

John Tomasi: Okay. And so, so what I saw was a negotiation. So this historical context was set up as one, as framed as, as a debate, but also with a need to reach, reach, reach a resolution. And there were some threats of boycotting. There are constant attempts to make alliances with the people and that people are making the alliances with one another would speak, would say to things like, don't you believe in this concept? Isn't this part of what I've been hearing you speaking of as leader of the communist party, for example, or don't you believe in this issue about gender equality or whatever, whatever the issues might've been. And they'd be trying to reach that. But then other people would say, wait a minute, don't go with them, go with us instead. We want our partition or we want it unity. And so I saw a lot of this sort of haggling and I'm trying to think, I'm trying to, I'm trying to capture for our, for our listeners, what was making the thing move forward? So they're there on the room, they have their roles, but what makes it go forward? What makes things happen?

Mark Carnes: So what happens, and this is true at, when faculty use it at other schools, that the first week of a game, students are confused and uncertain, and they don't really believe what they're saying. But then as the game begins, they sort of understand the context. They are attentive because they know they've got to speak and enter this. They've got to, they've written a paper and they'll have to advance their views and others are going to contest them and their peers are going to be contesting them. and so they've got hyper-focus because they can't just sit back. And so they're, they're, they're paying attention. They don't understand. But by the second week, they not only are beginning to understand the context, but they're starting to understand their ideas. And you came in the fourth week where they now understood their ideas. They could articulate them. They'd done one paper, they're working on a second and they're seeing how everything works and they're fighting to go forward with their ideas and their goals. They're pretty much doing it themselves. Now I'm looking at my, my, I'm looking at our papers and I'm nudging them if they miss a point or the misunderstanding, or if they're missing an opportunity, I'll say in my assessment, you should have, why don't you look at this text? And you can strengthen your argument with that. Or why don't you consider this? Also, we use cell phone during the class and I'll text students. did you hear what X said? Are you going to let them get away with that?

John Tomasi: You would text the students?

Mark Carnes: Yeah. And now that's one of the things we learned during COVID. When, when reacting had to shift to online presence, we learned that to, to use Slack or a discord or something. So when the students were playing games during COVID, their faction would be reacting with each other under, on discord or Slack. And it became a very powerful, it's probably the most powerful sort of COVID teaching style because the students are interacting with each other in a game rather than listening to someone thrown on and on. So what we learned during COVID that, that, that, that using that the instructor, we used to pass notes as an instructor, you know, or why don't you don't, you should be X, Nizam of Hyderabad, this affects your future. You should say something. Now we just say, Hey, don't you think you should weigh in on this? Or shouldn't you look at this text or something like that? So, so there's a little bit of vaccine nudging from the instructor, cheerleading, shy student gives a great speech or stands up to someone who's growing them. So I say, good job.

John Tomasi: so there's what you're doing as a game master.

Mark Carnes: And you're right that, that I didn't say hardly a thing during that.

John Tomasi: It was remarkable.

Mark Carnes: It was remarkable, but I'm sort of texting and I'm cheerleading.

John Tomasi: It's like, it's like, you're the referee and the coach at the same time. And, it's great fun. I mean, it was visible to me that the students had picked up the responsibility to come to class knowing something and what's more to be in the classroom thinking actively and seriously. And people are changing their mind. Well, there was some remarkable, there was a remarkable, series of exchanges that I remember most vividly where at one point, a group of, village leaders came forth to argue against one of the positions that was looking like it was going to carry the day and they were saying they wouldn't sign onto it because it was going to give women's rights. And they were defending a very, very strong, patriarchal conception of their, what their society is like, what their communities are like, what their villages are like. And these are all young Barnard, Barnard women who are taking on these roles of the village elders, making that case, not in a wooden way, not in a, not only like a professor might say, well, a double advocate might say the village leaders would say, no, it was rather being presented powerfully by women. And I just, that's something that really struck me because I've never seen anything quite like it. And, yeah, I've never seen anything like it.

Mark Carnes: No, no, no, no. For, for, for, for, for a young woman at a, who's, who's an ardent feminist to give an impassioned speech against women's rights based on, the perspective of a rural Brahmin, she understood the role. It made some sense to her, and she was able to inhabit that role and articulate that sense in a quite passionate way, as you saw, which is, it was one of the, just one of the glorious things, and there was a defender of communism. I remember one of the communist leaders, I think there were two communist leaders, as I recall, and they were, you know, making the case for communism at a time now, after the cold war, Soviet unions fallen, we've sort of had enough history now to see some of the terrible things that happened under communist rules, but there they were trying to capture actually seeming to live the idealism of this ideal. That's more universalist. That's going to be generalizable. It's going to be egalitarian and saying, shouldn't, this is a historic moment. This is decolonization and living that and expressing that in a way that was beyond role playing. It was, it was, it was lively in a way that's hard to really describe. It, it is a joy for this sort of teaching. And it's also, it's at one point that you talked about how the students sort of came in and began things on their own without my bringing a gong. it's rare that a student will miss class and reacting. It's just, even students who don't like the experience, who find it, too intense or, or just fearful of, public speaking. they come to class anyway, cause it's so interesting. They want to see what happens.

John Tomasi: Right. And the instructor doesn't know what happens. It's going to happen. you're not sure who can step, what, what arrangements will be worked out, what the governor's general are going to do, what's going to unfold, how the vote's going to turn out, which makes the class exciting for the instructors too. say what the role, can you say a word about the role of the dice?

Mark Carnes: Well, the different, in that, in that situation, I think Gandhi declared that he was going to go on a hunger strike.

John Tomasi: Yeah. That was the, that was the big background.

Mark Carnes: So then you roll a die every 20 minutes, which represents a couple of weeks and there's a chance that he'll die. And if he dies, there are all sorts of things that then happen. And then the game continues.

John Tomasi: Well, yeah, the game will continue. Yeah.

Mark Carnes: But, or, or that there's, I think that the, if the communist figure does a very good job and succeeds in a, in an intermediate goal, there's a chance that Stalin will provide some arms to them. So there's a die roll for a bunch of different things. And so the students wouldn't even know what that die roll is about. I don't, sometimes I'd say there's a die roll, but it's a private die roll. And the person knew what the die roll is about.

John Tomasi: So another, so another one of the factors that's sort of moving the game forward, moving the conversation forward is that things in the, in that world are occurring, events are happening. Like for example, Stalin makes a decision to do something or not to do something or Gandhi dies or does not die. So those are things that they now have to have to keep responding to. That keeps the game moving. And keeps everyone on their feet and gives them a chance to think things through in different situations. And it makes it fun too.

Mark Carnes: It also brings into, to the historical management issue of contingency. I mean, I, I've written lots of books in history. I've written a textbook on American history. And I say, this leads to this, leads to this, leads to this. If I don't say that in, in a sort of direct way, students will get confused. But I've left out that it really could have gone lots of different ways. And in my lectures and in my textbooks, I like other historians emphasize causation in a fairly simple way. Otherwise, students will, won't know what happened. But the truth of the matter is that history could have gone very differently. And so what the reacting does is that it, it, it, it exposes the students that history could have gone in lots of different ways. And that, and a lot of what matters is what human beings do. Do they step up to the plate? Do they make the important speech? Do they persuade people? Do they come up with a good solution? Do they fail? And that's a very empowering thing for students. They see that the political process just doesn't unfold without them, that it really requires active agents. And those who, who are active, who are involved, who are solving problems, who are leading factions effectively, all of them make a difference.

John Tomasi: That's right. That, that seemed, I remember feeling in the room that there was a three dimensionality about the events that were happening. It wasn't just the roles that were being assigned and the facts or the questions that were being set to solve. There was also this third dimension of personality, that actual student was going to be an important determinant in the way the conversation would come out and the way the decision would come out. A very powerful, like that village leader, one of the village leaders who came up in this really key moment and stuck with that position and really argued for that view about the traditional family and the traditional norms. She was a leader.

Mark Carnes: Amongst a group of committed feminists, absolutely. And it was a shocking moment to look at everything in a different way. And, and what it showed, as you said, was that the power of a, of someone who can think and speak and interpose herself in history is palpable and real. And now they think about it. And we don't teach that.

John Tomasi: How, how could one? Because if a normal, and normally we learn about what's happened and how, what came out and that's all obviously fascinating. But to realize that if that person, if a different personality had been representing, the Indian national Congress, or if one of the Gandhis rather than the other Gandhi became more present at that moment. Then this whole thing could have come up differently. I want to ask you, I just want to tell you about a conversation that I had, just last, last weekend. I was talking with Suzanne Nossel, who's the CEO of PEN America. This is a group that's very interested in defending literary freedom. Suzanne has a solid phrase. They defend freedom of the imagination. And Suzanne said to me, I wrote it down. I'm just going to read it. She said, there was no, there was no crime of literary trespass. That is, you can write literature and there's no crime of what you write and what you read, who you read, who you depict in your literature. Writers should be free to explore any identity, any role. Their mind should be allowed to go there and they shouldn't be shut down because they're transgressing something. And when I think about, I was thinking about you when I was talking with her and thinking about PEN America with her, talking about PEN America with her. And I just wonder what you think about this sort of parallel that I'm going to just suggest to you from reacting. That's just, there's no crime of historical trespass. And there's something like freedom of historical imagination. Does that sound like reacting to you? Is reacting something different?

Mark Carnes: What's you hit the nail right on the head. That's exactly right. That, that, that we asked that's, that's modern American student to imagine. What it would be like to be a village leader in, in a remote village, Hindu village. is that an offense against history to say that this student should have tried to imagine what that world was like? Or is that education? Education is going beyond what you know and who you are. That I know some things. These things tend to affirm my beliefs and help define who I am. But to learn more, you've got to go outside of what you know. And as you bring more things into you, that should change who you are. And if you're saying... It should change who you are. Of course it should. That's called learning. You know? and the, that this student who's making this leap of imagination is writing these papers, trying to understand the world of rural Hindu villages in 1940s India is, is going beyond herself. And as you said, that, that, that she internalized the ideas and she's learning all about a world that she knew nothing about. And she now can articulate to some extent this world that's, that's antithetical to her own personal beliefs. She's learned a hell of a lot. And if she had stayed in her own little world and her own set of ideas, she would be diminished, I think.

John Tomasi: And that's really one of the great concerns. It's one of the, I think it makes perfect sense that one way to get outside of yourself is to read imaginative literature that takes you outside of yourself to, to inhabit different characters and different worlds and, and to learn and grow in that way. That's, that's education. And to say, no, we need to hunker down into who we are authentically are helps just ensure that our authentic self is very small. That's, that's, that's fine. And, and, and just to make it explicit, the same, a process that occurs, of course, all the different roles that we saw in that game and in other games too. But for example, that student who was arguing for the communist party position, probably is not a communist, she's probably going to be working at Goldman Sachs in a couple of years or something like that, who knows? But having taken some time to think, well, what would it mean to argue for that world? And then she goes back to inhabit her own world, which she's going to still be who she is, the Goldman Sachs person, let's imagine. Nonetheless, she's different. She's has some, some wisdom and some depth of understanding about her own specific way of being in the world, her choices, her values, her goals, her career. You know, some things now about that, about that that she might not have known before.

Mark Carnes: She's learned the value of empathy too, which, which I think is very important in all learning is to have enough humility to know that you might be wrong and that there's something to learn from other people. I mean, we, we talk about the need for communication skills, but part of the communication skills is to listen to other people to gain their knowledge. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's not just to get along. It's, it's, it's to learn and grow. and I don't think our lecturers don't help people do that. Our, our lecturers, I don't think they're very effective. Learning research shows there's some data, some data showing it's been, it's, it's the data for the past 45 years.

John Tomasi: Tell us about, tell us about, about that.

Mark Carnes: Well, it's, well, it's the main sort of insight from learning research for the past 40, 50 years that the lectures are ineffective and loosely structured discussions are ineffective pedagogical tools. I mean, there's, there's not much of a debate on that in the education community and our underachieving colleges, a book by Derek Bok, over a decade ago, he said, it's really interesting. This research is pretty much incontrovertible that lots of research that shows you don't learn much from, from taking lectures. And most of it's forgotten quite quickly. And if you take, you know, you look a year later, it's almost all forgotten. So why do we persist in lectures and loosely discussion, loosely structured discussions? And he says, out of tradition and faith in the past. And he says, here we are, apostles of learning through research and reason. And the research says we shouldn't do this, but we hold to it tradition and faith. And it's, it's, I push back.

John Tomasi: Can I just, I'm just thinking about, my own experience as a student and I hope what I was trying to do when I, as a professor, there's something about watching a professor down there, giving a lecture, trying to understand the way, watching their mind work, watch how they process information, watch how they analyze things. This could be in a history class. I'm thinking for an art history class I took a million years ago, where I watched the person show the diagonal lines on a painting I didn't seen before. And I suddenly saw the painting differently. I've never gone to an art museum since without looking for, you know, compositional structure, which I didn't know existed. So there's, I mean, we can debate about what, you know, what if it meant to learn nothing or to forget it all. Oh, well, what does that mean? You might learn things about what it means to process information in a really deep way and sort of see that at play in front of you might have a value that might not be measured by some of these tests. So I'm sort of giving us, there's something about the traditional approach in some areas. But by the way, I was going to say in STEM, nothing more about that, but I gather you do reaction in STEM as well.

Mark Carnes: We do.

John Tomasi: Which is fascinating. Yeah.

Mark Carnes: Well, we can talk about that. John, I teach a large lecture class at Columbia, so I'm a little bit embarrassed to make this denunciation of lectures. And here in this conversation, I have launched onto these long lectures. So I see there's a little bit of a mischievousness in my approach here to denounce lectures while giving lectures to you and the podcast audience. So maybe, maybe I hope so, but it doesn't do the sorts of things that I think we need to do in higher education, which is to, is to get students passionately and actively involved in learning and, and exploring the world. And we don't succeed in doing that. At least I don't recall it happening very often when I was an undergraduate. And though I try my best in the lecture room to, to, to inspire students, I, I doubt that I succeed very much.

John Tomasi: So we've been having this conversation so far, ironically, perhaps, and a somewhat has a historical way. We've been talking about different ways of teaching history as though that without regard to the particular challenges that students face, if they want to become learners on their campus at any particular era in our era now in this era, students have a lot of focus on identity. There are agents on campus in the dorms, for example, and in all kinds of means and programs, orientation programs, teach-ins, and so on that often emphasize identity and the importance of thick identity and holding your role and not crossing over to other people is not transgressing. We have, we give examples and innumerably at HxA, we chart them all the time. Is there something about this moment and the challenges that students face to learning right now that the reacting method reacts against or that reacting challenges or that it improves? And do you see yourself, do you see reacting as playing something that reacting, the reacting I think playing some special role right now, or is it the same all the time?

Mark Carnes: Well, I don't know if, it seems that social media has intensified the way that people define themselves, that they've always, individuals have sought to carve out their identity. But social media allows you to curate it in very fancy and sophisticated ways. And if there's an aspect of yourself that gets negative feedback, you know it immediately. And so you then eliminate that part of your persona. And then you, so there's this very carefully curated self and students then are comfortable in navigating within the parameters of their carefully curated self that's been approved and tested in social media contexts. And that's special. And I think it's harmful in that it makes them reluctant to move outside of that self. I think that's been true always. But social media intensifies the process. And it really obliges how, how do you learn beyond your increasingly constricted self? How do you learn, understand other people to, to empathize with other people, to learn from other people? so yes, I think that, that the reacting does exactly that. It says you're going to wear the shoes of an, you're not, you're not, may not wear the shoes of another person, but you're going to wear their role sheet and their objectives and their goals and figure out how they function and think. And one of the things you learn is that while giving the speech as an anti-feminist, when you are a feminist, you learn that the other side could come up with some, some arguments that are plausible from their perspective. And that sort of humility, by God, we need that. The idea that the other person isn't just evil, there's a, of a ideological system that, that they hold to, that, that makes sense to them and that it might be worth understanding it.

John Tomasi: You use the word humility. Can you just say a little bit more about that? What, what's the relationship of humility to education?

Mark Carnes: I know I'm right. So why do I need to learn anything? No. I know I'm right. So why do I need to learn? Right. And. Or my side is right. Or there's a set of views that are right. And then through confirmation bias, everything you pick up reinforces what you know. And if you're not, and you weed out the stuff that doesn't fit your, your sense of persona and beliefs, and, and how do you get out of that cycle? I mean, that's where we are now often as a nation. and then reacting is one way to get out of that cycle. Let me give you, whether I don't know, two examples. We mentioned that, that, some of the games are in sciences. And when Fred Purnell, who is a philosopher of science at, Queens College, he said he wanted to do, this is back in 2003 or four. He said he wanted to do a reacting game, the trial of Galileo on the trial of Galileo. And I said, how can you do a game on that? Everybody knows that the earth isn't motionless at the center of the universe. How can you argue, that Galileo was wrong? He said, well, it's not that hard. You just argue Aristotle and, and, he, he died and we, we, we continued with the game and Aristotle's argument on the immobility of the earth. So goddamn powerful and persuasive that students playing that game, the first phase of the game, conservatives always win because they're making Aristotle's compelling, demonstrable arguments that are just irrefutable. And, the, the, the Lynn Chans who are defending Galileo and calling for science are tend to sit back thinking it will be obvious, but their arguments are weaker that, that, that, the, the, the, the Galileo hadn't, hadn't found the sort of proofs that, that, that, that the compelling proofs to refute stellar parallax basically. But, so, so, so the, so the students can, who are taking the Lynn chain position that the, the contemporary position almost always lose the first phase of the game because the Aristotelian view is so compelling. Well, that's a very good thing to realize that you can argue persuasively that the earth doesn't move and it happens to be wrong, but you can still, I'll have another argument. I think I've got it in my notes here. Well, maybe I left it on your desk, so I'll have to summarize it. But, probably 12 years ago, we had a game that was the Peel Commission set in, Palestine in 1936. And it was the Peel Commission, the British commission that's coming to try to figure out what to do, with Palestine. And, I had a reacting, some of the reacting students were taking this as an advanced course. And, these are undergraduates, undergraduates. And Farida, a student whose life had been shaped by 9-11, she had been in high school during 9-11. And when there were all these sort of attacks on Muslims, this caused her to become more, attuned to her Muslim background. And she, formed a, Muslim student group in her high school. And she gave speeches, trying to explain Muslim and she wore a hijab. And so when we started this game, we're assigning roles. Usually I like to assign roles randomly, but in this case, I wanted her to be David Ben-Gurion. And then Joshua was another student at Columbia. he had, he was a leader of AIPAC, which is the, the organization that's supporting Israel. He raised $160,000 for, Israelis who were victims of, terrorism. And I was leader of the, pro-Israel, organization on campus. And I assigned him, Ani Abdul, Alad, who's leader of the Palestinian, one of the leaders of the Palestinian by command. And, Rita said that, oh my God, Ben-Gurion's exactly like me. And so I was Ben-Gurion and, and, Joshua said, I, I kept, I kept Ani, you know, I knew what Ani was about, but I could play the game and I got to understand him and I played him and I was doing well with him. And, and at the end of the game, I asked him how, how he felt. And he said, I would have been, if I had been born there, I would have been Ani. I admire him. I, I hope that I could, and when the game came to the pivotal point, would he, Joshua Ani agreed to partition, which is the British proposing in the game and in history? Ani said, I couldn't, Joshua Ani said, I couldn't do that. I would be betraying the legacy of someone who worked hard, who had strong principles. He held to his values. He held to his principles. I hope that I, Joshua, will have that sort of strength and integrity when I grow up.

John Tomasi: So to his own principles.

Mark Carnes: To his own principles. That's right.

John Tomasi: So, so does, so what did he gain from this experience? Does it, does it made him any less of a, of a Zionist?

Mark Carnes: I don't know, but, but he understands a hell of a lot more as, as does, Farida Ben-Gurion, who said that she, she lived with Muslim, suite mates. And she said that, I got so excited about David Ben-Gurion and they got upset and they refused to, so I just stopped talking about the game to them. But she was so, so admiring of David Ben-Gurion, even though she, she, she, she was such a committed Muslim.

John Tomasi: These are the kinds of adventures that make a college education magical.

Mark Carnes: Well, exactly. And meaningful and life-changing and deepening. All these things are at play.

John Tomasi: I want to ask you, we're, we're, we're coming to the end of the podcast, but I want to talk a little bit about- And I, and I, and I, and again, I've, I've talked so much. You've been such a indulgent question. I brought you here to talk to our, to our, to our audience. I wonder if you could just say a little bit about the reacting movement, because you're, you're a professor, you're, you're a scholar. I mean, frankly, you're a scholar, scholar. You don't even own a television set. You, is that true?

Mark Carnes: I did. When our daughter was growing up, we didn't own a TV set.

John Tomasi: That's right. Okay. So you were something like a scholar, scholar.

Mark Carnes: And I didn't have the time. And you're right. I didn't have the time. I didn't have the time for TV.

John Tomasi: And, and yet along with being a very accomplished, academic scholar, and obviously a really thoughtful teacher, you're something of an entrepreneur as well, in terms of spreading this reacting idea, not just at Columbia and Barnard, your own classes and a few places else, but you'd say something about there's, there's a movement that seems to be underway because of you. Can you say something about that?

Mark Carnes: I couldn't have imagined when I was trying to, to make my classes tolerable that anything like this would happen. I couldn't have imagined the path of my own, my own life, but that's, that's the way things go. But what happened was that other people started asking if they could try it out and then word of mouth spread and it spread to a particular group that sort of venturesome people who had their intent up to try, try to do something different.

John Tomasi: These are professors you would meet through the American Historical Association and locals in New York. How did, how did it start to spread?

Mark Carnes: I don't remember even how that, that, that just other faculty began doing it and it spread by word of mouth amongst other faculty members, word of mouth amongst other faculty members. Now then in 2004, the Reacting program at Barnard won the Theodore Hesburgh Award as the nation's sort of outstanding innovation. That gave us a sort of, mass publicity and that accelerated.

John Tomasi: What year? What year was that?

Mark Carnes: It was 2004.

John Tomasi: Right.

Mark Carnes: And so, so we went from say 15 colleges, universities using reacting to like 80 or 90. And then it just spread by word of mouth. And there, other faculty would try it and they could write games and then they wanted to be part of this enterprise. I didn't know what the hell was happening and, but more and more people, but not just any people, there's the creative people who've got their antenna up, who are trying to do something different. People in the science, then, then some scientists came into it and we got an NSF grant and created some games in the sciences. And then different disciplines moved into it. and they said, we need a whole structure to, to help guide the development of these games. Some games take 10 years of development. So now we've got 34 published games. We've got an editorial board that's managing 250 games that are being developed along these lines. whole systems of support of social media. I'm an instructor. I've got an issue and odd thing happened in my class. What I do. And there are 2,600 professors in this website who say, oh, I had this happen when I played that game or, or had this internet. So there is this infusion. There's network learning going on. Absolutely. There's this infusion of ideas of creative, venturesome people who are working with an absolutely new paradigm on how to teach, which is the idea of creating a structure, making it compelling, and then pushing students into it and encouraging them to, to, to percolate through it. it's completely a new concept of, of learning that, that these very clever people who were better pedagogues than I am, I've come into it and are just, just developing in, in these gloriously inventive ways that I couldn't possibly have imagined.

John Tomasi: So like, it's like any good entrepreneur, you've created a system that attracted talent and gave them the space to sort of do new things that you wouldn't have thought of.

Mark Carnes: You're really generous, but it's not so much that I created it, but, but we never had an administrative structure to stop anyone from doing things. So, so it became much more, who's to stop me if I do something different.

John Tomasi: Let me ask you, let me ask you about that.

Mark Carnes: So we do have a, we do have a not-for-profit organization. We do have an editorial board, not-for-profit corporation. And so we do have an administrative structure as we do to have a board. we do have, membership institutions that help keep us going. anyone who wants to find out about it, just Google Reacting to the Past and Reacting to the Past. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, or the reacting consortium.org. the, I, the game books are, but that's, you know, that will connect you to the game books and to the, you get the instructor materials and the role sheets from the consortium where you download them as an instructor. we have conferences where faculty come together and have the best time of their lives because they play, they play games to learn the pedagogy is the best way to learn is to play it. And we're having the, we're having reacting featured at the HxA conference in Chicago this coming summer.

John Tomasi: And, you know, one of the things you, I'm struck with you, you just said, who is there to stop us? And you were able to just move into space and make things happen. The Heterodox Academy were interested in reforming universities, making them better. We explore all different kinds of strategies. I've had people on the show who talk about federal legislation rules in the UK, for example, to encourage free speech on campuses. We've had, we're interested in state changes, state-based legislative changes. We're like interested in, convincing presidents to try new things, disciplines to try new things. You're doing something that's a pedagogical approach. It's a form of teaching. It begins organically in a classroom with you and some students figuring out some new way to do things. It starts to spread organically. It seems absolutely among individual professors who have the autonomy to decide how their classrooms are, are managed and run. And this new way of, I don't want to call it a fighting back against the identitarian, worldview because you're not part of the culture wars, but that I can see it from that perspective, from an HxA view that there's no one to push back against you, but you're very, it's very against the spirit of the age in many ways. I think in the most positive sense of being against the spirit of the age. So I, partly the, partly why I wanted to bring you on the show and to have you talk to our audience was to show that, to showcase that there's different ways that change can happen. Sometimes it's not systemic. You're reacting. It's not going to change the academy and make open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement magically magnify across the country, but it's an organic piece of the puzzle that's growing by attracting people on its own merits to this way of teaching and this way of interacting with students. That's that really, that's really what strikes me about what you do and how it connects to HxA.

Mark Carnes: Well, I think you're, I think, I think you're right. They, I think that we're in a particular moment that is of, of this hunkering down in identity that isn't going to prevail. I think that human beings love make-believe. They love make-believe. They love make-believe. Now, Freud and the others were suspicious of it and thought that this sort of make-believe was a childish thing and that, that, that it's sort of dangerous and you'd outgrow it. And the whole generation of, of, of pedagogues and philosophy and psychology folk persisted in this, this notion that you give it up. But we know just from online worlds that, that adults love make-believe. Everybody loves make-believe. It's fun to get outside of yourself and it's important to do so, to, to, to see, to see the world in a different way. And that's, that's, that's not going to be stamped out. And you're, you mentioned the literary tendency that, that, that, that of course, that, that, that writers want to see outside of the constraints of their own world. And artists want to go beyond what they know. Human beings want to imagine different things. And that's, that's just compelling. That's, that I'm not worried about that, in the long run.

John Tomasi: That's a nice historical perspective. Mark Carnes, thank you so much for appearing on Heterodox Out Loud.

Mark Carnes: John, thank you for having me and letting me talk for so much. It's been a pleasure.

John Tomasi: Thank you. I've really enjoyed it too.

Mark Carnes: Thanks for having me.