Bringing the past to life: Students at UPEI can now learn history through role-playing

The University of Prince Edward Island is putting a new spin on how it teaches history by offering a course that gives students the chance to play the role of historical characters.

The second-year course — "History in Action: Experiencing the Past through Roleplay" — was recently approved by the university's senate. It aims to teach students why events unfolded as they did and engage with the past as it was experienced by people who lived at the time.

"I can stand up and lecture and say 'this happened and then this happened and this happened.' And that's not particularly interesting," said Richard Raiswell, chair of UPEI's history department and the professor teaching the course.

"If you have students take on characters, if they take on … historically accurate positions, whether those were positions that they would accept now or whether those were positions that they would completely and utterly reject — these are important things for students to understand."

Raiswell's course uses active learning and role-playing teaching methods developed by the Reacting Consortium at Barnard College in the United States.

Pioneered in the late 1990s by one of the college's history professors, this way of teaching history promotes "communication, competition and creativity among students," according to the consortium's website.

Educators can pick from an array of role-playing games on a variety of subjects.

Raiswell said there are numerous benefits to role-playing in the classroom, including a better understanding of what historical events would have felt like to those experiencing them.

"Historical empathy is one of the things that we really try to get across in this," he said.

The method has an added bonus of helping new students get used to speaking in class.

"In this class they have no choice. They've got to interact with other students from different majors, different faculties," Raiswell said. "There's a lot less on the line for them if they're speaking because they're speaking through the voice of their characters."

While this is the first full UPEI course dedicated to this style of teaching, Raiswell has applied it to some of his other courses in the past.

Hayden Rajamanie, a second-year English major, said he's used role-playing in one of his other history classes, and thinks it's "a great idea" to dedicate an entire course to the method.

"You're getting new angles of the history from each other," he said.