You be Hitler: is role-playing a good way to teach history?

Simulation games give students a rare understanding of how historical events were experienced by those at the time.

That is the view of Michael Barnhart, distinguished teaching professor of history at Stony Brook University in New York state, who has long used such games in his classes. They require students to read up about particular historical characters, role-play them in interactions with others – often bringing red shirts or cigars if they are representing Soviet leaders or Churchill – and then produce journals about what they learned.

Even now, Professor Barnhart told Times Higher Education, he was “still in a small minority in my own department”, where most colleagues were “sceptical about the utility of the entire approach...It seemed impossible that students could be learning anything useful if they were having fun.”

Yet today, as Professor Barnhart argues in his newly published Can You Beat Churchill?: Teaching History through Simulations (Cornell University Press), “There is a quiet revolution under way in how history is taught...This book hopes to make it a noisy one.”

To encourage more lecturers to make use of existing simulations and even develop their own, he draws on examples of “roleplaying games” developed by the Reacting to the Past project at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York, exploring everything from the trial of Galileo to the debates about “suffrage, labour and the New Woman” in New York’s Greenwich village in 1913. He also refers to his own simulation, Great Power Rivalries 1936-1947, offered over a whole seminar alongside lectures on the same theme.

Can You Beat Churchill? examines the practical and emotional challenges of using simulations, and tricky issues around assessment and allocating roles, including who gets to play Hitler. But where does Professor Barnhart see the advantages in such methods?

Their chief value, he replied, was that they taught students that “history is not a timeline where events were fixed in stone” – and can be regurgitated in tests – since the characters they are playing “didn’t know what was going to happen”.

As an example, Professor Barnhart pointed to debates about the origins of the Second World War. There was a standard narrative, largely developed by Winston Churchill – and still widely evoked by politicians warning about “appeasement” – that his predecessor as prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, was “a coward or an idiot who made consistently bad decisions and ignored the rise of Hitler”. When lecturing on the subject, Professor Barnhart had “a terrible time” trying to get students to consider a more nuanced view of Chamberlain. In a simulation, however, “the students on the British team, particularly the one representing Chamberlain, will come up with lots of reasons why it was perfectly understandable and even right for him to make the decisions he did”.

Simulations, in Professor Barnhart’s view, could help build empathy. His book cites the case of “an Arab American student who played Himmler” and later “confess[ed] that he had never understood Jewish sensitivities until he had figuratively put on his SS uniform”.

Furthermore, Professor Barnhart went on, because simulations inevitably give students a sense that “they do not know what is going to happen next”, this leads them to “study the information available to them more intensely” to “find out what actually happened”. This not only made them better historians, he believed, but “better analysts of the decisions, personal and larger, they face in their everyday lives”.

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com