How teachers can conduct historical reenactments in their own schools

Childhood Education, Summer 2001 by Morris, Ronald Vaughan

The people of the past not only practiced different customs, but also held different attitudes and values, making it very difficult for elementary students of the 21 st century to interpret their lives.

The flames spring up, igniting the tinder and sending out wood smoke; the 8-year-old students automatically move back from the cooking fire. When the coals are ready, a French marble cake will cook in a Dutch oven. A few feet away, in the next group, a shuttle slips between threads before being pulled tight. Inch by inch, the garter tape grows until it is long enough to hold a 9-year-old student's stockings in place. These are just a few of the daily tasks undertaken by elementary school students experiencing a historical reenactment.

If you want us to like history ... put visualizations and activities [into it] ... don't keep it in the textbook ... don't have it all reading and writing and ... essays and tests ... what you've got to do is ... take them out and show them how it was. How it was done. Let them do it themselves ... active, fun things to do make it exciting.

-Nathaniel, a student reflecting on his reenactment experience.

Educational Reenactment

A reenactment is the re-creation of a scene, time period, or event, done as authentically as possible by a group of people. When people attempt to go back in time through reenactment, they experience a culture that is alien to them. The people of the past not only practiced different customs, but also held different attitudes and values, making it very difficult for elementary students of the 21st century to interpret their lives. Students must construct their knowledge about the past by deconstructing their understandings of the present. This poses particular problems for social education in that students have limited understandings of both the present and the past because of their limited number of experiences. To work backward from those limited understandings presents multiple opportunities for misconceptions.

An educational reenactment takes the in-depth cultural experience of participating in a reenactment and joins it with the educational structure of a social studies classroom. Students learn not only about events, but also about the people and the broader time period. The goal is to make the life of the student approximate life in a past time period as much as possible. In a reenactment, students take on daily jobs and activities that are similar to what the people of a chosen time had to do, primarily centering around making sure that they have food, fuel, shelter, and clothing. The students also must understand the conflicts, political issues, and community problems from the era.

Reenactments can be as varied as historical interpretation and imagination allow. Open-air museums, such as Greenfield Village, Michigan, attempt to re-create a historic landscape, thus setting people in a historic context. Living history farms, such as the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in Indiana, attempt to demonstrate human interaction with the land. At some historical sites, such as Williamsburg, families can muster with the militia. Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts, offers programs in which costumed students play the game of graces on the village green. Conner Prairie offers a glimpse into pioneer days through first-person historical presentations. Many Civil War sites reenact famous battles, including Perryville (in Kentucky) and Gettysburg (in Pennsylvania). Festivals such as the Feast of the Hunters' Moon at Fort Ouiatenon Historic Park in Indiana allow history clubs and and student groups to visit, trade, and rub shoulders with French, Indian, and English peoples of the 1750s.

Although many families have made reenactment sites the destination of their vacations, and history clubs and gifted students have experimented with reenactments, there remains great untapped potential for use of historical reenactments as a way to teach about social studies. This article, while providing general guidelines for doing reenactments, focuses on the French Colonial days. Of course, teachers may tailor these suggestions to suit their own classrooms and reflect the historical signficance of their areas.

Reenactments can include a single class, a grade level, or the entire school. Teachers may be able to work with volunteers from a local historical site in creating reenactments. Many local historical societies are looking for this type of collaboration and are open to establishing a creative partnership with schools. Collaborative programs such as these help the local museum to justify donations, get grants, maintain community support, and fulfill their vital educational mission. Students could perform guard duty around a historic fort, serve a Victorian tea in a house. museum, or pump water on the grounds of a living history farm. Smaller museums and historical sites are often more receptive to innovation than are larger sites that entertain large groups of children daily.