Faculty donate prize money to launch conference about reacting

October 1, 2024 (Volume 48, Number 3)
Article by Peg West

composite photo of Anne Caillaud, David Eick and Janel Pettes Guikema

From left are Anne Caillaud, David Eick and Janel Pettes Guikema. The trio of French professors donated prize money from the Reacting Consortium to launch a November conference.

Three faculty members lauded for their innovative work on a student-centered, history-based learning approach have donated the prize to help launch a GVSU conference about this method.

French professors Anne Caillaud, David Eick and Janel Pettes Guikema received the award for their work on Reacting to the Past, which involves elaborate games, set in the past, where students are assigned character roles with specific goals that are informed by classic texts in the history of ideas.

The class sessions are run by students with guidance from instructors to work on big ideas. Students maintain the beliefs of the historical characters they play, but come up with their own ways of expressing ideas.

The faculty members received the Brilliancy Award from the Reacting Consortium, which recognizes work that represents "a particularly ingenious or creative idea or pedagogical practice that advances Reacting games."

The GVSU experts were particularly praised for showing how "previously overlooked" foreign language learning can be incorporated into this method, expanding its disciplinary reach. A faculty member from another institution who nominated the group said the Grand Valley instructors have proved through assessment that the experiences increased students' language competency.

“The pedagogy is immersive," Guikema said. "Students become a historical character for several weeks, walking in their shoes, debating ideas and engaging with texts, all in the target language. Former students come back to tell us how impactful it was.”

The faculty members' $1,000 award money will help with the presentation of a November 7-9 conference on the Pew Grand Rapids Campus called Reacting at Grand Valley State University: Thresholds of Democracy. The conference is billed as a "sampler" for high school and college instructors to invigorate their classrooms.

Eick said GVSU is a founding institutional member of the Reacting Consortium with support from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies. He said Gretchen Galbraith, former GVSU history professor, pioneered the approach here about 10 years ago.

"These days, there are over 20 faculty run games in Classics, History, Honors, Modern Languages and the School of Interdisciplinary Studies," Eick said. "Inhabiting a role seems to make students less reticent to speak, and the playful aspect assuages their nerves. But this is serious play: In order to 'win,' students have to speak and write a lot, persuasively, about complex ideas. And they’re motivated to do it."