New Books In Education

“All classes are sorta boring” (p. 19). This statement is one that college students might believe, along with many of their professors, but not Dr. Mark Carnes, author of Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College (Harvard University Press, 2014). In Carnes’ book, he describes a new type of learning and classroom pedagogy called “Reacting”, where students take control of the class by being immersed into various roles in a certain event in history and given a competitive goal to complete by the end of the exercise, sometimes over a month long. For instance, students could be assigned as Jacobins in the French Revolution or Gandhi during the partitioning of British India. Each role is different and each student is tasked with various objectives to complete. The method, which can be used in disciplines beyond history, is akin to Model UN or mock trials, but on overdrive. Carnes, professor of history at Barnard College, asserts that through these immersion activities students will gain a better se