I begin this introduction on a flight home from New York, three hours removed from the Reacting to the Past (RTTP) Annual Institute at Barnard College. This is the fifth RTTP program I have attended and the fifth return flight I have spent mulling over the questions about history teaching that inevitably arise. The editors’ invitation to write this introduction allows me the opportunity to think aloud about Reacting to the Past as I put this set of essays into a larger framework for JGAPE readers. As a Progressive Era historian and contributor to conversations about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History, I am pleased to see the journal exploring what Reacting pedagogy has to offer instructors and students. I hope this introduction, along with the essays that follow, sparks additional conversation about ways readers might employ RTTP games to foster sophisticated understanding about the Progressive Era and better understanding of what students immersed in the pedagogy learn about history as a discipline.

I'll tip my hand at the outset: I am a Reacting enthusiast. As Mark Carnes, Ian Binnington, and Amy Tyson all attest, students become deeply invested in Reacting to the Past simulations. This alone might be good news to anxious administrators, defensive department chairs, and instructors searching to justify humanities education and provide “student engagement” evidence they can tout to donors and legislators. As Carnes reports in his essay, students who usually do not care much for history find Reacting games exciting and compelling. It changes how they think about themselves and imagine their capacity to act on ideas and beliefs. In other words, it offers transformative education.Footnote ¹ It also requires that students write, speak, and research, and they tend to do so with a sense of purpose, as Binnington notes. Many of the institutions using Reacting do so as a first-year experience: students work hard, think hard, and become immersed in their work together—they experience frustration and laughter, key components of building classroom community.

Carnes suggests that students find Reacting engaging because it is playful and competitive—which he argues Dewey eschewed for college classrooms but which are nonetheless key attributes of the kinds of games they play online or away from campus in fraternities and sports arenas. Dewey may not have encouraged college instructors to play games as a mode of instruction—indeed he rarely spoke about learning beyond childhood—but when he did speak about play and work it was usually to argue against a false dichotomy of the two.Footnote ² Indeed, if Reacting were only fun, it would not have made its mark in higher education classrooms to the extent that it has. Instead, as Binnington's essay make clear, Reacting students do serious intellectual work, both developing “critical thinking skills” and learning to think historically about particular content concepts. I am also a Reacting enthusiast because I believe it can be a vehicle for further exploring how students learn history.

Binnington offers some examples of how students learn history in the chaos that seems to ensue in the Reacting classroom. He writes, “History imposes limits, and although this is a pedagogy that centers on human agency and contingency, there have to be limits.” These limits might be expressed as the “The 5 C's of Historical Thinking” that Flannery Burke and Thomas Andrews have outlined: change over time, context, causality, complexity, and contingency.Footnote ³ Or they appear as the demand for integration of primary source evidence and historical interpretations that students in well-run simulations consult throughout game play. Binnington's essay suggests that the instructor must be engaged to guide learning of content and concepts. Here too, we might find Dewey helpful. The key to success in Deweyan education and the famed lab schools depended on teachers—putting students at the center never meant eliminating the role of the teachers. Instead, Reacting offers the richest grist for the teaching mill when instructors observe student activity to identify the assumptions, knowledge, misconceptions about the past that undergird their game play, and then build a new road map toward deeper understanding. Dewey did demand teacher mastery of the cognitive structures and content of a discipline and a very nimble mind. And so does Reacting when used in the history classroom, as Binnington notes. Students he writes, should be “historically reflective as they leave the game.”

But we hardly need to set up Dewey as a foil to recognize the richness and benefits of RTTP for GAPE classrooms. While Reacting has found a home in general education and first-year experience classes, many faculty also use games in their upper level specialty courses. One of the most popular games is one set in the Progressive Era; Amy Tyson's review of Mary Jane Treacy's Greenwich Village, 1913 emphasizes its value for Progressive Era courses. Students confront issues of labor, feminism, immigration, and race. They encounter historical figures and their ideas as they read primary sources to prepare for their roles and speeches. They spend multiple sessions discussing issues in character, which requires them to think on their feet as they apply these complex ideas in debate and discussion. Though Tyson's review does not articulate it directly, the genius of the game is that it helps students expand their schema of the Progressive Era. Many of my students come to my classroom knowing little about the period except it was one of bad working conditions, lots of immigrants and strikes, poor housing, and new legislation. Embedded beneath their understanding of the era is that social change is driven by political parties, legislation, and courts, but they conceive these as flat processes. “Conditions bad, laws make them better.” Greenwich Village, 1913 helps them see the logics that shape the institutions and values that structured historical actors' lives; they begin to see the cultural complexity of social change. Tyson points out, for example, how seamlessly the nuances of feminism and its influence on the built environment weave into a game about suffrage and labor—topics that most students imagine through the lens of the American Federation of Labor, Jacob Riis, and the Nineteenth Amendment, which all flatten out in their memory as a time in the past when the world was worse off than it is now. I have found that starting out my students with a short game set around the Paterson Silk Strike magnifies and nuances questions of industrial capitalism, technological change, and immigration, interrelating them with other issues—municipal corruption and political reform, radicalism, women's education, activism, and consumption.

Together these essays speak to the questions that inspire me on those airline trips after each Annual Institute. How does this pedagogy help us address the bottlenecks that impede students’ understanding of the historical discipline and the contributions of humanistic sensibilities to problem solving in the present? How can a Reacting game help students grasp threshold concepts needed to advance their understanding of historical change during the Progressive Era? I hope the series of essays encourage JGAPE readers to explore Reacting as a useful tool in our classrooms.