EMU professor Mark Higbee's role-playing game about Montgomery Bus Boycott to be taught at Troy University workshop

Teaching method avoids lecture format, instead seeks to engage students' hearts and heads, to help them understand the complexities of key moments in history

YPSILANTI – A historical, timely and highly educational role-playing game developed by an Eastern Michigan University professor is being featured at a workshop this week at Troy University in Montgomery, Alabama.

Mark Higbee, a longtime professor of American history at Eastern Michigan, will be featured today (October 21) during a day-long event teaching his new Reacting To the Past game, entitled  "Montgomery 1956: The Bus Boycott Challenge to White Supremacy."    

Mark Higbee

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a defining event in the American Civil Rights Movement. On December 1, 1955, four days before the boycott began, Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala. bus. She was arrested and fined. The boycott of public buses by blacks in Montgomery began on the day of Parks' court hearing and lasted 381 days.

An appropriate location

"This workshop is being held at the Rosa Parks Museum, which is next to the bus stop at which Rosa Parks was arrested, so this location is especially touching to me,” Higbee says.

Those attending include faculty and students from a variety of Alabama universities, including several Troy and Auburn campuses, and some K-12 teachers.

"Reacting to the Past" is a college method of teaching that involves elaborately designed games in which students assume historical roles from a famous moment in history, and then pursue the goals of their assigned character - in collaboration with some classmates and in opposition to others. The game was invented by Mark Carnes, a professor of history at Barnard College, in New York City.

Higbee, who has taught at EMU since 1994, created Montgomery Bus Boycott game at EMU after learning of the method from Carnes and studying it extensively. He has also invented a game involving Frederick Douglass and the struggle between critics and advocates of American slavery in 1845.

Understanding white supremacy

“Like the Douglass game, the Montgomery game leads students into an engaging confrontation with the roots of white supremacy in American society,” Higbee says. "I have used the Montgomery game, in less polished form, in class at EMU. I believe it fulfills the high objective that John Hope Franklin and other great educators articulated a generation ago: With the complexities of American racism in history, how can teachers avoid being didactic or preachy, and instead to really engage students' hearts and heads, to make some sense of them." 

Higbee, who has been teaching Reacting to the Past in a variety of his courses at Eastern since 2006, estimates about more than 1,000 students have experienced the method through his classes and those taught by other EMU faculty members. 

The Reacting method teaches skills in research, writing, public speaking and teamwork. The method and various associated games are used at more than 300 American colleges and universities. The games last from two to five weeks.

 “All Reacting games inspire students to confront difficult ideas, to engage in both teamwork and competition, and to imagine being someone they are not, whose beliefs mattered,” Higbee says. “Reacting is intellectually rigorous and fun for students, who also develop their communication skills as a result of the game."

Higbee earned his bachelor's in history at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and then his master's and doctorate at Columbia University.

About Eastern Michigan University

Founded in 1849, Eastern is the second oldest university in Michigan. It serves 22,000 students pursuing undergraduate, graduate, specialist, doctoral and certificate degrees in the arts, sciences and professions. More than 300 majors, minors and concentrations are delivered through the Colleges of Arts and Sciences; Business; Education; Health and Human Services; Technology, and its graduate school. EMU is recognized by national publications for its excellence, diversity, and commitment to applied education. For more information, visit the University's website.

October 21, 2016

Written by:
Geoff Larcom

Media Contact:
Geoff Larcom
glarcom@emich.edu
734-487-4400