RATCATCHER – SIMULATION HISTORY
ESSENTIALS
WISE WORDS
"You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club."
--Jack London
READINGS
CURRENT WORK
PAST
SIMULATIONS
SIMULATION HISTORY
After a beginning that can only be characterized as serendipitous (having been forced to change from a conventional to an experiential method of teaching due to incontrovertible evidence of the inadequacy of the conventional mode to teach the course material) the developmental trajectory of this course has taken on a life of its own. This will of course always be the case when the members of the class (that is, both the students and their teacher) let loose their imagination and creativity. Nevertheless, this development has been neither uncontrolled nor haphazard. Using deliberate and precise formulations, and adjustment of same according to the sociohistorical theory of activity, I have changed the parameters of the course from iteration to iteration, learning more with each attempt. I do not regard the earlier iterations as errors--far from it--but as organic elements necessary for the students and me to learn and build upon.
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Some words from Joker (Batman, Arkham Asylum)
"Look at all this new security! How's a guy
supposed to break out of here?"
I think everyone (me, most of all!) was surprised at the overwhelming success of the first simulation, The Trial of Saavedro (2006). In the next simulation, A Murder in Crihloth (2007), I added material enabling students to ground themselves in the techniques of external organizational communication (though more generic, not specific to the course content) and some considerably detailed intervention halfway through the course.
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By the third iteration, The Dreams of Auriane (2008), I tried to run the simulation without any readings or basic training at all, but due to circumstances beyond our control (class cancellations during a harsh winter, and of course the tragedy of the Cole Hall shootings) this experiment may have been derailed. By 2009, and Truck Stop at the End of the World, I had the procedure more in hand, providing students with training in the processes and techniques of external organizational communication, but doing so with specific reference to the subject matter of the course, in such important, yet under-recognized, areas as military intelligence; network-centric warfare; black ops and propaganda; and the "selling" of international conflict.
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The next thing I did to develop the course (following the input of Megan Woodruff, an important participant in the previous simulation) was to try to get students playing the role of external organizational communication practitioners to address the "same" image management problem from three different historical periods, resulting in Original G (2009) in which the controversial death of heavyweight boxer Sonny Liston is engaged by promoters in the 1960s; nationalists in the 1970s and 1980s; and rap music moguls in the 1990s. Based on previous analysis, as well as intuition, I came up with one of the most useful parameters yet yielded by the course: that the groups simulating the three different historical periods could, in their external organizational communication campaigns, use only the media that would have been available to them during that time period.
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In the next step, I took on international politics and popular culture in the here and now, with That Certain Female. Here the elaboration was based on a character who is both blessed and cursed with the name Shevchenko, the most famous name in her country, Ukraine. This elaboration was stimulated by the various renderings (during the previous simulation) of Sonny Liston's character (and his associated notoriety in various historical periods), leading naturally to interesting questions about fame and its role in the design of external organizational communication.
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The next stage in the development of the simulation was driven as much by external sociocultural circumstances as by design. Through secret negotiations to which I have never been privy and which were sprung upon me in the middle of a semester, COMS 608 was declared as not satisfying graduation requirements for any of the four areas of our department (communication theory, media studies, journalism, and rhetoric).
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Had those making this decision even the remotest understanding of the course or of experiential learning, they’d have known that the course not only legitimately satisfied requirements in one of these areas, but all four! We study numerous communication theories (all in the first three weeks of the course, before we get down to the business of the simulation); engage in numerous analytical and applied processes related to formal and informal rhetoric; write and (within simulation parameters) disseminate a variety of journalistic and public relations productions; and end with a sophisticated media production typically involving live performances and media enhancements.
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As I reflected upon the legacy of this wondrous course, I was moved to recall the remarkably diverse central protagonists of the previous adventures and I thought what a kick it would be if they could somehow all be brought together to solve one of the greatest organizational problems of this century: the tangle of competing organizations in the days leading up to the second, fatal landfall of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, 2005. My class, no longer comprising "traditional" graduate students, was an absurdly talented and delightfully mismatched lot of professionals; a law school student (who completed his law degree and passed his bar exam in two different states, on the first try, while taking the course!); two active military reservists; a skilled and proven forensics coach; and some precocious undergraduate students I'd asked for help. The name I chose for the simulation, The League of the Last Resort, couldn't have been more appropriate.
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In a word, they succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, thereby reinforcing something that experiential learning literature always tells us, but we sometimes forget: in experiential learning, life knowledge and life experience counts for way more than learning from academic literature. Although the final production may have left something to be desired (each simulation class usually has one big area for improvement and one area in which it surpassed all the other simulations), the class stood utterly in their unflinching confronting of group process problems and in their embodiment of the best principles of effective group work. They had wildly divergent opinions about everything, and ended up confronting each other repeatedly, but in such a mature manner as to obviate any lasting damage to their relationships with each other. I've never had a class in which students could simultaneously never step back from an argument and yet "work things out."
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Frankly, having brought together elements of the previous simulations, I intended The League of the Last Resort to be the last iteration, kind of a "swan song," a tribute to what had gone before; however, having observed the superb group process, I knew we would need another, to test out and apply what I had learned from this nonpareil group.
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To this point, I'd learned the following about simulations and the elements that make them up: (1) actual events and characters are preferable to manufactured ones; (2) reconstruction of historic times and places that are less well known is preferable to current ones that are better known; (3) it's better if there are at least a couple of iconic or famous figures, mixed together with lesser-known historical figures, and a few fictional figures manufactured out of whole cloth; and (4) there should be an imaginative, emotionally appealing overarching idea “driving” the whole simulation. Please remember that all that went into this simulation is the result of rigorous analysis (based on the sociohistorical theory of activity) and that Waltzing Matilda stands at the apex of all of our previous efforts.
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The next simulation, My Family's Always Been in Whiskey, focused on the running of illegal moonshine whiskey in and around Harlan County, Kentucky, in the year 1955. A number of historical figures, including politicians, rock-and-roll musicians/promoters, the "Queen of the Mountain Bootleggers," and the most famous youth icon in American history, played a part in a complex scheme to defraud a loose-knit, though sinister, crime family known as "The Dixie Mafia." The central character was a fifteen-year-old girl, Jennifer Dandy, who has to pretend to be a boy in order to drive on whiskey runs. Jenn runs afoul of an old woman who heads the most powerful illegal liquor concern in America and has to take on a suicide mission to have a chance at saving her family from its dark and dangerous past.
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Another recent simulation, 'Dad's Gonna Kill Me (Spring 2015) was the first to tie the current simulation to the previous one. In this simulation, the main characters were the children of the four focal characters from My Family's Always Been in Whiskey, and moreover, relied for their strategy to invade Fallujah upon a visual code used by the moonshine runners back in the Harlan, Kentucky, world of the 1950s.
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The subsequent simulation, Nothin' But a Man (Spring 2016), focused on a direct descendant of the legendary black steel driver, John Henry. Jonathan Tiberius (J. T.) Henry collides with corrupt builders and politicians in 1923 Harlem, in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, with opportunities for students to take on the roles of some of the most influential figures in African-American politics, art, music, and writing.
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Next in the sequence, I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night (Fall 2017) centered on the plight of a young Latina labor organizer catapulted into the controversy surrounding the election of Donald Trump and its delterious effects on the California farmworkers, most of whom are undocumented immigrants.
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Spring 2018's simulation is a reboot of My Family's Always Been in Whiskey (originally performed in Spring 2014), the first time in the course's history that a scenario has been repeated, albeit at a different university and with a different group of students (honors students).
Fall 2018's simulation, Ratcatcher, while not extending an entire previous scenario, does expand a key process from a previous simulation (The League of the Last Resort ), specifically the time/space travel technology (developed in secret from Nazi research by the agency known as M.I.S.T. [Multiverse Integrative Simultaneity Taskforce]) that enabled the team of super-consultants to be extracted from their own space/time configurations and transported to the five days in 2005 in New Orleans, prior to Hurricane Katrina's second, fatal landfall. In the upcoming simulation, a supremely confident but idealistic agent commandeers M.I.S.T.'s process to track rogue Nazi agents to unravel a plot to use time travel to arrange the famous of minority music icons such as Selena, Biggie Smalls, Johnny Ace, and Tupac Shakur.