“Reenacting the Rosenbergs: Engaged Learning and Thinking Historically”
By Dr. Kelly Shannon, Assistant Professor
History Department, University of Alaska Anchorage
Context of the Inquiry
This inquiry took place in the following course, which I taught in the Spring 2013 semester:
HIST 453: America in the Cold War Era, 1945-1992
Department goals for 400-level classes are for such courses to foster learning for each one of these SLOs, and most 400-level courses include a research paper as the culminating assignment.
Focus of the Inquiry
The focus of this inquiry is the use of an engaged learning activity to promote students' acquisition of historical skills. For this Spring 2013 course, which 21 enrolled students completed, I created an assignment on the 1951 espionage trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, which historically resulted in the conviction and execution of both of the Rosenbergs for having supplied atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The assignment required students to assume the roles of specific historical actors involved in the trial, reenact the trial over the course of three class periods (including a jury verdict), and engage in a post-mortem group discussion comparing the historical trial to the classroom reenactment. Students then wrote an assigned paper on the historical trial which asked them to draw upon work they did for the reenactment.
I was inspired to create this assignment by Barnard College's Reacting to the Past (RTTP) initiative. According to the RTTP website,
Reacting to the Past (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills. Reacting to the Past was honored with the 2004 Theodore Hesburgh Award (TIAA-CREF) for outstanding innovation in higher education.
Reacting to the Past's rationale and pedagogy is as follows:
In most classes students learn by receiving ideas and information from instructors and texts, or they discuss such materials in seminars. "Reacting to the Past" courses employ a different pedagogy. Students learn by taking on roles, informed by classic texts, in elaborate games set in the past; they learn skills—speaking, writing, critical thinking, problem solving, leadership, and teamwork—in order to prevail in difficult and complicated situations. That is because Reacting roles, unlike those in a play, do not have a fixed script and outcome. While students will be obliged to adhere to the philosophical and intellectual beliefs of the historical figures they have been assigned to play, they must devise their own means of expressing those ideas persuasively, in papers, speeches or other public presentations; and students must also pursue a course of action they think will help them win the game.
Having attended a workshop on RTTP at the 2013 American Historical Association annual conference in New Orleans, and because several of my colleagues at other universities have used the RTTP system with positive results, I wished to implement this approach in my courses. However, the RTTP games are still in development, and none were appropriate for the content of my upper-division courses at the time I taught this course. Thus, I developed this assignment myself and used the RTTP program as a loose inspiration for the Rosenberg trial assignment. Similarly, the RTTP website and the workshop I attended did not include any discussion of how to assess student performance or learning using their pedagogical techniques, so I devised my own assessment for grading student performance in the reenactment itself and paired the reenactment with a written paper as another way to gauge student learning.
My current inquiry seeks to answer whether or not the Rosenberg Trial reenactment activity fostered student learning and historical skills, specifically:
In order to assess the activity and answer these questions, I had the students complete the reenactment and related paper assignment. We then discussed the assignment together as a group, and I asked them to fill out optional evaluations of the activity at the end of the semester. I explained this inquiry to them, and they signed permission forms allowing me to use their reenactment performances, paper grades, and evaluation forms in my assessment of this teaching activity for the purposes of this Making Learning Visible teaching inquiry, which they understood I will ultimately publish on CAFÉ's MLV website.
Course Design and Implementation
The course met every week for the full 15-week semester. Class periods were twice a week for 75 minutes each. The course was an entirely in-person (as opposed to distance-based) course. The typical class meetings involved a combination of lecture, group discussion, and music or video clips. I placed my primary emphasis on discussion and only provided brief lectures to give students context or necessary background for the topic of each day’s discussion. Assigned readings for each class provided students with additional historical context and information. This course is reading-, writing-, and discussion-intensive.
I structured much of the course the way I typically structure my upper-division courses, based on thematic units that progress chronologically through U.S. history after 1945. Course assignments progressed from shorter graded assignments that exercised different historical skill sets to a final research paper, which asked students to combine the various skills they deployed over the course of the semester.
Study Design: My assessment of this learning activity is based on the following: student performance during the in-class trial reenactment; post-reenactment voluntary surveys completed by the students in April 2013; IDEA Course Evaluation Survey results given at the end of the semester. Much of this involves qualitative data (i.e., surveys and student feedback), but I will also use quantitative data (student reenactment performance grades and written assignment grades) to confirm and explain the qualitative findings.
[ Survey re: trial ]
I believe that this assignment worked quite well in fostering student engagement and learning. However, next time, I need to address the main problem that students pointed out in their free responses, namely the fact that some students (especially the attorneys and judge) had significantly more work to do to prepare for the trial than others. I would also seek to perfect a way to assess student learning through this activity vs. more traditional teaching techniques.
Dr. Kelly Shannon