Pirates in the College Classroom

As both an academic historian and an Experience Designer who has worked in the living history museum industry I have seen firsthand the increased interest and content mastery that experiential techniques can produce. In a class I teach on Golden-Age Piracy, students begin with the images of popular culture pirates in film and literature. I then introduce the “real” historical context of piracy (naval technology, global trade, the impact of slavery, etc.) The students are divided into “crews” to learn the skills and knowledge they would need to be seventeenth-century pirates. They are introduced to seventeenth-century maps of Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, and learn the basics of celestial navigation, types of ships, sailor’s knots, seventeenth-century pirate games, songs, and traditional folklore.

I developed this class as an experiment in whether museum-based techniques would work in the college classroom. Early-modern history is difficult to teach, because students often fail to see relevance, but the role of historical imagination that is fostered by the experiential techniques allows them to see themselves in the past, and see the impact of the past on today’s world. When difficult issues present themselves (capital punishment, the slave trade, treatment of women, etc.), I include museum best-practices readings on how historical realities can be dealt with in the context of modern perspectives. In addition to content, students learn about the free-choice historical learning that takes place in museum environments.

            Cultivating the historical imagination and encouraging students to “put themselves in the past” is one of the best ways to promote historical understanding. Caution must be used in ensuring an accurate and rigorous application of research and knowledge of primary sources, but combining best practices from both history and experiential learning fosters a lively, engaging, and ultimately highly productive learning environment.