"The Chinatown Game"
Students participating in "The Chinatown Game"
Even now, we could hardly say where in the COVID story we find ourselves, but the academic year that began in August 2021 felt definitively “mid-pandemic” – the vast majority of us transitioning back to campus life and in-person classes and meetings, albeit masked and wary. Some online teaching practices from the previous year bridged over in helpful ways – including allowing those in quarantine for COVID, or those who were still abroad, to be able to join virtually as necessary, and also, for special guest speakers to pop in with ease.
The final quarter of “Chinatowns,” a class I teach on the cultural history of global ethnic enclaves, is usually devoted to an intensive RPG in which students play out a series of scenarios in a fictionalized Chinatown space, while inhabiting different roles, ranging from local activists to merchants to politicians and urban planners and developers who might hold vastly different political, cultural, financial stakes. I wrote the game to challenge the students in my Chinatowns course to put all their intensive historical and theoretical readings of the first nine weeks of the term into actual practice - what are the stakes in building a community? What makes people affiliate with certain communities and not others? What are the varying stakes for different people and institutions within a community? Who belongs, and who decides who belongs? Whose interests are valued, and whose voices are heard? What happens to tenuous alliances in times of crisis?
The ability of players to enact their roles convincingly, making informed arguments drawing from their prior learning, and their intensive interactions with other players, have always been the key to winning the game. Our “mid-pandemic” state led to some trepidation on my part in running the game: what if a key player or players fell ill? How would we bring together students across two separate sections (an artifact of Zoom teaching in which I had split the typically larger lecture course into two smaller classes) into a single game? Would there be the same level of intellectual satisfaction and achievement if much of the roleplay and debating were to take place online? Should we really be wheeling-dealing and interacting intensively in-person in game mode, if COVID numbers were to again surge?
Our collective comfort with virtual and hybrid interactions turned out to be a great virtue, however, in this year’s gameplay. “The Chinatown Game” had several smaller and one culminating large in-person session (with a dramatic climax). And it was played out just as intensively on our Discord server almost 24/7(!) throughout the three weeks. So much of the gameplay would seamlessly transition from in-person to online than back to in-person. Public hearings and presentations, dealmaking, alliances, community building, backstabbing (literal and figurative), proposal making and dramatic reversals – continued unimpeded. The space of the classroom felt geniunely and productively expanded.
Every iteration of the game has yielded unexpected outcomes, this year included. On a personal level, it felt really really special to return to this mode of interactive in-person pedagogy (even if masked!) after a year and a half of reaching out to students through screens. I was endlessly impressed with the flexibility and ingenuity and dedication of my Duke students, not only in The Chinatown Game, but in all facets of their work in all my courses this year.
Many more adventures in hybrid and ‘mid-pandemic’ teaching and research could be recounted, but I thought I’d share this one happy instance from my past year.
Happy summer!
Eileen
For more photos/videos from the class, click the link below: