The UO’s Global Scholars Hall recently played host to the followers of Mahatma Ghandi and leaders of a 1913 sufferage protest.

Call it a blast from the past with an academic flavor. The UO was the site for a two-day regional conference on “Reacting to the Past,” an award-winning active learning approach to instruction that has been adopted by instructors at more than 300 campuses in the United States and abroad.

“Reacting to the Past” consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles of historical figures informed by classic texts. The games typically last several weeks in class, plunging students into complex worlds and forcing them to debate the big questions of human experience.

Hosted by UO history professor Ian McNeely, who is also associate dean for undergraduate education in the College of Arts and Sciences, the conference was attended by roughly 50 faculty and students hailing from the region but also from as far away as Oklahoma, Arizona and Ontario. During the two-day workshop, professors engaged in one of two intensive games: “Defining a Nation: India on the Eve of Independence, 1945,” or “Greenwich Village 1913: Suffrage, Labor, and the New Woman.”

A full report on the conference is at: With History As Their Stage on the College of Arts and Sciences website.