A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year In Minds on Fire, Mark C. Carnes shows how role-immersion games channel students’ competitive (and sometimes mischievous) impulses into transformative learning experiences. His discussion is based on interviews with scores of students and faculty who have used a pedagogy called Reacting to the Past, which features month-long games set during the French Revolution, Galileo’s trial, the partition of India, and dozens of other epochal moments in disciplines ranging from art history to the sciences. These games have spread to over three hundred campuses around the world, where many of their benefits defy expectations. “[Minds on Fire is] Carnes’s beautifully written apologia for this fascinating and powerful approach to teaching and learning in higher education. If we are willing to open our minds and explore student-centered approaches like Reacting [to the Past], we might just find that the spark of student engagement we have been searching for in higher education’s mythical past can catch fire in the classrooms of the present.” —James M. Lang, Chronicle of Higher Education “This book is a highly engaging and inspirational study of a ‘new’ technique that just might change the way educators bring students to learning in the 21st century.” —D. D. Bouchard, Choice

This book, the first in a series entitled Historical and Pedagogical Issues: Insights from the Great Lakes History Conference, addresses historical and pedagogical issues. It explores the agency of historical actors tied to larger movements, demonstrating the efficacy and power of individuals to act with historical impact. It also describes the nuanced role of memory, often neglected in larger national or global social movements. This volume explores these powerful themes through a broad range of topics, including the research and pedagogy of revolution, reform, and rebellion as they are applied to race, ethnicity, political movements, labour, reconciliation, memory, and moral responsibility. The book will interest researchers that have an interest in both, or either, history and pedagogy.

Since the release of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, role-playing games (RPGs) have spawned a vibrant industry and subculture whose characteristics and player experiences have been well explored. Yet little attention has been devoted to the ways RPGs have shaped society at large over the last four decades. Role-playing games influenced video game design, have been widely represented in film, television and other media, and have made their mark on education, social media, corporate training and the military. This collection of new essays illustrates the broad appeal and impact of RPGs. Topics range from a critical reexamination of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, to the growing significance of RPGs in education, to the potential for "serious" RPGs to provoke awareness and social change. The contributors discuss the myriad subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways in which the values, concepts and mechanics of RPGs have infiltrated popular culture.

Videogames have risen in popularity in recent decades and continue to entertain many all over the world. As game design and development becomes more accessible to those outside of the industry, their uses and impacts are further expanded. Games have been developed for medical, educational, business, and many more applications. While games have many beneficial applications, many challenges exist in current development processes as well as some of their impacts on society. It is essential to investigate the current trends in the design and development of games as well as the opportunities and challenges presented in their usage and social impact. The Research Anthology on Game Design, Development, Usage, and Social Impact discusses the emerging developments, opportunities, and challenges that are found within the design, development, usage, and impact of gaming. It presents a comprehensive collection of the recent research, theories, case studies, and more within the area. Covering topics such as academic game creation, gaming experience, and violence in gaming, this major reference work is a dynamic resource for game developers, instructional designers, educators and administrators of both K-12 and higher education, students of higher education, librarians, government officials, business leaders and executives, researchers, and academicians.

Though much has been written about ethic of care and its importance in education, little is available to guide Christian educators who desire to demonstrate a disposition of care toward self, learners, colleagues, and community. As this book makes clear, a Christian ethic of care serves to illuminate our relationship with God while also helping to flesh out what care looks like in various contexts, including and especially teaching and teacher education. How Shall We Then Care? invites engagement with questions not just about what teachers should know about care, but about how they are to care for those in their circle of influence, what it means to care, what counts as care, what practices nurture care, and how care is experienced. The authors are teachers and teacher educators who, like you, have struggled to find answers to these questions. The settings for these explorations span the spectrum from K-12 classrooms to Christian and public higher education, covering issues such as trauma-informed classroom practice, the use of role-playing games for teaching ethics, the transition from teacher candidate to novice teacher, the crucial interface between care and inclusive education, and the vital role empathy plays in educational care.

This book provides classroom practice and research studies that verify Reacting to the Past (RTTP)—a student-centered, active learning pedagogy that provides college students and faculty unique teaching and learning opportunities—as a high impact practice for student learning and engagement. The overarching objective of this book is to collect practices and evidence from multiple disciplines and institution types regarding the efficacy of RTTP in higher education classroom settings. At its core, RTTP is a game-based pedagogy with published games on some of the most conflicted moments of human history. While RTTP is deeply grounded in theory and literature that suggests its approaches can be impactful, deep and broad examinations of RTTP pedagogies in a range of course settings have not been extensively performed until now. This book provides guidance and an evidence-base on which to build RTTP practices.

Simulation and game-based learning are essential applications in a learning environment as they provide learners an opportunity to apply the course material in real-life scenarios. Introducing real-life learning allows the learner to make critical decisions at different points within the simulation providing constructive education that leads to a cognitive understanding of the material. The use of simulations provides the learner with the ability to cognitively store and recall learning in real-life experiences. Therefore, it is crucial to not only provide course material but to have students apply what they have learned in simulations that replicate real-life scenarios. These learned skills are essential for students to be marketable and thrive in a career field where decision making, problem solving, and critical thinking are job requirements. Simulation and Game-Based Learning in Emergency and Disaster Management is a cutting-edge research book that examines the best practices and holistic development when it comes to simulation learning within emergency and disaster management as well as global security. Drawing upon the neuroscience of learning, classroom instruction can be enhanced to incorporate active-experiential learning activities that positively impact a learner with long-term information retention. Each simulation project is carried out in different environments, with different goals in mind, and developed under various constraints. For these reasons, this book will provide insight into the simulation planning and development process, provide examples of online simulations and game-based learning activities, and provide insight on simulation development and implementation that can be used across disciplines in educational and training settings. As such, it is ideal for academicians, instructional designers, curriculum designers, education professionals, researchers, and students.