I had a group of undergraduate students who almost always did their readings for the day, but on this one particular day: they hadn’t. They all said they had midterms to do and chose a class to not do the work for and it was mine. Lesson plan scrapped, I needed to quickly come up with something to do, and all I could think of was this post.
Our lesson for the day was on historical re-enactments and why people did them. My students, having not read their assignments, couldn’t understand why anyone would want to engage in a re-enactment and didn’t understand the point. So I set them up with this game, explained the rules, told them they had 45 minutes to make the largest group without a witch in it, and let them go.
Within thirty minutes they were getting loud enough that I was worried I’d need to tone it down because I didn’t want to bother other classes. Some students went full in character, they created elaborate backstories, they improved their way through the entire thing and in the last five minutes had created an entire imaginary community based on this elaborate tale they’d created and were damn near ready to commit murder, screaming “she’s a witch” and splitting into two distinct groups with a lot of hand grabbing and pulling to get people into the right group.
When I told them the truth, they were stunned speechless. I reminded them of the rules: all they had to do was make a group without a witch in it. I never told them someone would be a witch, and they presumed someone would get the role. Similarly, the salem witch trials presumed that there were witches and invented them in their group.
They told me after we did our wrap up that they had been learning about the witch trials in other classes, but had never understood why anyone would actually believe in witchcraft. They were shaken, not only by the realization they were about to throw hands with their fellow students, but that all it took was someone in authority to imply something was so.
The “re-enactment” helped them to understand something that just reading about the trials hadn’t.
And, it also helped them to understand why some people do engage in historical re-enactments. They all admitted to having A Lot of Fun and that it was something that gave them a chance to just play and engage and do something they’d never done before: actually experience the history they were studying (sort of).
It was an excellent exercise, and I’m grateful for this person for writing about it because it worked so well for our class.
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