Leslie Todd, Art History
Students play the Prado Museum Expansion game in ARTH 111
In Spring of 2022, I presented in a “Teach and Tell” at the Center for Teaching with Amy Patterson on using “Reacting to the Past” games in the classroom. Reacting to the Past (RTTP) is: “… an active learning pedagogy of role-playing games designed for higher education. In Reacting to the Past games, students are assigned character roles with specific goals and must communicate, collaborate, and compete effectively to advance their objectives. Reacting promotes engagement with big ideas and improves intellectual and academic skills.”
I was first introduced to RTTP as a graduate teaching assistant for a humanities course at the University of Florida. Because we played two games in the course and I was new to the pedagogy, the professor for whom I was working generously applied for a grant to include me with her at the RTTP consortium’s Winter Conference. While there I learned more about the technique and participated in playing in an abbreviated version of a game to gain firsthand experience of what we were asking students to do. By the end of the weekend, I was fully invested in the benefits of the games and was energized by its possibilities. As I expressed at the 2022 Teach and Tell, it fosters student autonomy, active engagement, and experiential learning. It engages students’ use of primary sources while exercising their speaking and writing skills and pushes students to inhabit alternative perspectives. I was most enthused by the possibilities of experiential learning that the games offered since, coming from a humanities discipline, the options tend to be restricted to field trips or other one-time only types of activities all of which can be costly or are tied to other limitations. Classroom gamification was an appealing model.
In Spring 2020, I finally had the opportunity to implement an RTTP game in my own classroom. I teach ARTH 111, Introduction to Latin American Art every spring semester. I organize the course chronologically with the first third addressing the ancient period, the middle third on the early modern period, and the final third on modern and contemporary art. From the beginning, I used RTTP to teach modern and contemporary art through a game entitled “The Prado Museum Expansion: Diverse Art of Latin America.” While most games ask students to reenact historical events such as the French Revolution, for example, this game is slightly different because it is based on a fictional scenario. In 2010, the Prado underwent major renovations. The author of this game imagined a scenario in which a part of that expansion included a new wing to incorporate Latin American art of the twentieth and twenty-first century. In the game, most students were assigned the role of living artists or art dealers representing deceased artists all vying for a limited number of spots available in the fictional new gallery at the Prado. The remaining five roles were of leadership positions within the museum who ran the game and determined the final winners. While the objectives of the game are straightforward, each student is given their own secret role sheet with gambits and somewhat underhanded motives that keep things interesting.
I played the game the first three years I taught the course. Students were energized and enjoyed it once they got into the new rhythm and pace, often responding with positive feedback at the end of the semester. The most common responses were that the game was fun, exciting, engaging, different, and unique. It was rewarding and invigorating to see students gain the confidence to take control of the classroom while exploring broad thematic questions such as “What is Latin American art?” After each semester, I would assess areas of improvement and make changes for the next year. However, I always felt something was slightly off or missing. During game debriefing, it became consistently clear that students were more focused on the intricacies of how the museum world operated. Understanding modern and contemporary art styles alongside the cultural phenomena that informed them became secondary. I finally had to confront the fact that as fun and useful as the game was and as much as the students were gaining from it, it was ultimately not fulfilling my primary course objectives in the way I originally envisioned.
In Spring 2024, I finally stepped away from the game and tried something new. I used the game role playing, participation activities, and writing and speaking assignments to formulate a new, end-of-semester assignment. I asked students to choose an artist from a list (following the list of artists from different art movements represented in the original game) and to take on the “role” of “teacher” to give a brief lecture explaining their chosen artist’s background and art style. They then had to write a paper comparing their artist with that of another student’s artist—ensuring they were still coming to class and paying attention during student presentations. Once the presentations were complete, we addressed the common themes that arose across the artists and assessed the question of “What is Latin American art?” While not a perfect reflection of the game, I took aspects of the game as inspiration to offer students a similar version of that same autonomy while remaining more aligned with my course objectives. To my surprise, I received very positive feedback on the assignment. Students like to hear from one another.
I am still a major proponent of RTTP but recognize that not only can it be intimidating for a non-RTTP inductee, but not all games perfectly align with our courses. If the idea of using three weeks of the semester to play a game in a singular topic feels like too much of a sacrifice to your course content, I suggest ordering a teacher’s copy of a game to pull ideas and formulate an activity and/or assignment drawn from an RTTP game. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel—just poach and transform the wheel. If RTTP is something you’re interested in, they do offer a limited number of micro-games on certain topics that are playable in one class session, which could be used as a model to invent your own micro-game!