A professor of history from Barnard College in New York delivered a lecture to an audience in the Student Center auditorium about distractions affecting the average college student.
Professor Mark C. Carnes came to Eastern Michigan University as part of the lecture series “Rethink Higher Education.” This lecture was one stop out of four lectures Carnes plans to give at Eastern.
“Football, Booze and Other Diversions: Win the Battle for Student’s Hearts and Minds,” was the title of the event. Carnes spoke on the disengagement of the student body from learning. While giving the lecture the professor joked how he finds lecturing to be “an ineffectual pedagogy.”
Reminiscing on the day he realized the problems of teaching and boredom in the classroom, he spoke of how he interviewed all of his students one semester.
After receiving overly rosy reviews of the class, the professor stopped with one student, telling them, “I was bored, you were bored, you could feel the boredom in the classroom.”
It was then he began to develop his now renowned pedagogy, Reacting to the Past, in order to engage students and grab their attention from the everyday distractions of college life.
College students are drawn to diversions Carnes claimed, drawn to “subversive play worlds” as he called them. Delving a little into psychology and the psyche of the average student, Carnes defined these subversive play worlds as activities or places where there is: an arena for competition, an element of fantasy, subversive hierarchies and an appreciation of the absurd.
He pointed to fraternities as one of these “play worlds.” A place where there is an arena for competition – drinking games. This element is one where Carnes spent more time before moving onto others, giving attention to the dangers of drinking games. It is reported that 44 percent of college students have participated in binge drinking.
Another element of subversive play worlds he believes fraternities often embody is an element of fantasy. Fraternity members often align themselves with each other referring to each other as brothers as some show of kinship. And there is a hierarchy in this “brotherhood,” all of whom share an “appreciation of the absurd,” according to Carnes.
But fraternities are not the only subversive play worlds on college campuses. According to a study cited by Carnes, “students spend 80 hours a week on online games.” These games include, World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, the Halo series and many others that offer an “element of fantasy.”
Carnes took a brief break during the lecture to show audience members a video by student Vinny Massimino, which displayed the subversive play worlds he spoke of.
The video portrayed students, many of whom were fraternity members, as putting more focus on fun than academics. It also highlighted some of the successes of Carnes’ “Reacting” way of teaching, which is somewhat of a game wherein students act out historical scenes.
“We need to harness the power of these subversive play worlds and apply them to intellectualism,” Carnes said.
Through his Reacting game, Carnes said he ensures an intellectual collision among students who must win in the arena of competition this game creates.
Students win by taking on historical roles and bringing an element of fantasy into the teaching method —two of the ways Carnes tried to capture the power of subversive play worlds in his pedagogy.
At the end of the lecture, Carnes assured audience members that learning could be as enchanting as World of Warcraft.
During the end, in a short questions and answer session, Carnes was asked whether his pedagogy could be applied to hard sciences such as physics. According to Carnes, he is currently working on just that — a system which would allow students to debate scientific models made by Galileo versus the models developed by Aristotle.
