The Reacting to the Past Project: Trading Races
Track:
Games and Simulations
Time:
9:00 – 9:45 am
Location:
President’s IV
Presenters:
Adeline Koh: Visiting Faculty Fellow, Duke Humanities Writ Large Program, Assistant Professor of Literature at Richard Stockton College
Eileen Chow: Visiting Associate Professor, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies
Session Information:
In this session, Adeline Koh and Eileen Chow will discuss their experiences using Trading Races in the classroom. Trading Races (http://tradingraces.adelinekoh.org) is an elaborate role-playing game set at the University of Michigan of Ann Arbor campus in April 2003. It has been funded by the Duke Humanities Writ Large grant, a Mellon grant aimed at redesigning undergraduate education in the humanities, and by the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
The game is is set two months before the Supreme Court landmark decisions on affirmative action in 2003. Players take on the roles of multi-ethnic and multi-national members of an imaginary Michigan Student Assembly, and present speeches on race related issues based upon their characters’ social and political orientation in gameplay. By asking players to assume the ideological worldview of people different from themselves, the game encourages players to “trade races” intellectually and emotionally. Trading Races is designed to be a Reacting to the Past game, where players are transported to a time period in the past and play historical characters. Through careful study of key texts and learning modes of argumentation, student players learn to engage with big ideas, and to empathize with points of view different from their own.
Koh will talk about her experiences designing the game. and Chow will discuss her use of the game in her classes in Spring 2013.