Recreating History in the Classroom

After over twenty years of teaching his­tory, it is very easy to burn out. Every year the students seem to grow younger with their mindset more distant. It is crucial to engage the students, yet this grows more difficult when I teach the same materials year after year. One principle that has guided my teaching is that when I am excited in the classroom the students learn more.

Throughout the years I have taught new courses, thrown away my hallowed lecture notes and done fresh research on the subjects, and encouraged the students to be much more active during class. As the majority of students have turned from the liberal arts to major in business, I have had to face the prospect of teaching fewer courses to a somewhat captive audience.

My experience with students who feel that they are a captive audience, is that they take their revenge on the teacher by holding back and discouraging any spontaneous expressions of interest. I’ve thought a lot about this dilemma, especially when I’ve been on vacation.

While vacationing (and on sabbatical) in the last three years in Britain, Cana­da, and the eastern United States, I’ve been amazed by the intense interest of the general public in historical artifacts, castles, houses, sites, and villages. Peo­ple plan all year long for their vacations, they drive hundreds and even thou­sands of miles, pay considerable sums, and expend long hours trying to get a clear picture of people from another time and place.

Some tourist favorites are the recrea­tions of Fortress of Louisbourg in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the Quaker Han­cock village in western Massachusetts, the Renaissance Festival in New York state, and Colonial Williamsburg in Vir­ginia. In the face of this dramatic, grass­roots fascination with history, I’m al­ways amazed by the general student attitude that history is dead and dull. What could I do to bring the tourists’ fascination into the classroom? For sev­eral years I remained stymied by this question.

The answer came as the outgrowth of a new methodology that I developed in 1985 for studying the dreams of histori­cal figures. Professor J. Donald Hughes of the University of Denver and I role-­played Alexander the Great, Humphry Davy, and Xenophon. The dream group participants, who were not his­torians, were utterly fascinated. When I explained to my students what I had been doing, they were interested and asked if I would role-play some of the people whom we were studying. I said yes, and in short order they were asking me questions as if I were a historical personage. We devised an interview technique and subsequently began to collectively research, write, direct, pro­duce, stage, and act in much more elab­orate historical recreations.

The impact on my teaching was and is enormous. In the past year I’ve had more fun teaching history than at any time since I first entered a classroom at Rutgers in 1963. This metamorphosis of work into pleasure has involved the re­structuring of my classes in European and business history.

I have role-played Sir Norman An­gell, Otto von Bismarck, Tadeusz Bor­owski, Winston Churchill, Friedrich Engels, Viktor Frankl, Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Himmler, Vladimir Ilich Le­nin, Karl Marx, Josef Mengele, James Nasmyth, Samuel Pisar, Sir Bertrand Russell, Ernst Schweninger, Joseph Sta­lin, Thomas Telford, Leon Trotsky, etc. My students have portrayed Marie An­toinette, P. T. Barnum, Charles de Gaulle, Dwight Eisenhower, Nikita Krushchev, John Lennon, The Pank­hursts, Margaret Thatcher, and a varie­ty of less famous individuals. An actor (who is also an administrator) with Broadway credits arrived at my class one day in the persona of Napoleon, and I transformed my identity to that of his teacher.

Student response has been over­whelming and positive. I’ve had their enthusiasm backed by their hard work. Three of my students, doing a play in four scenes on life of the common peo­ple in Holland under Nazi occupation, made up elaborate playbills and wrote over ten pages of script. They also read about their subject and thought very hard about what it was like to be Dutch in 1942.

After giving it considerable thought, I made the performance of a historical recreation mandatory for the students in my course on contemporary Europe. Only one student was so uncomfortable with the idea of performing before her classmates that I exempted her from the exercise. Later, she came by my office to request inclusion. She simply didn’t want to miss out on the excitement. The administration at Ramapo has been most encouraging. When our new presi­dent heard what I was doing, he inter­ viewed me for his radio show and said he’d like to play a role in one of these “mini-dramas” if he had the time.

In June I took a delegation of Rama­po students to an international confer­ence in New York to illustrate points I was making in my paper on innovations in teaching. The students were thrilled to be attending a convention, and the historical methodology was most enthu­siastically received by my colleagues. With my help, one German instructor planned to introduce these techniques to his students in July.

For the seven years that I taught Western civilization at Rutgers and Temple universities, I considered it to be the bane of my existence. This com­ing semester I have volunteered to teach it for the first time in sixteen years. I find that I am looking forward to this teaching challenge precisely because of the opportunities it gives me to recreate with my students the lives of such fasci­nating people.