"I had to double check my thoughts": How the Reacting to the Past Methodology Impacts First-Year College Student Engagement, Retention, and Historical Thinking

REACTING TO THE PAST (RTTP) is an innovative history pedagogy adopted by colleges and universities nationwide, in many cases as part of programming for first-year students.1 Featured in articles published in higher education periodicals such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Change, Reacting is a pedagogical method that is widely known both inside and outside the historical profession. This embrace of RTTP by college and university history departments and administrators does not come in a vacuum. For universities nationwide, the issues of student engagement, retention, and graduation loom large in public discussions in the media and in state legislatures. This was certainly the case at Eastern Michigan University (EMU), a Midwestern public comprehensive university, where Reacting was implemented as part of an institutional first-year student retention initiative. After The New York Times pointed out the low graduation rate at our institution in 2009,2 EMU’s then-Provost, Jack Kay, mobilized the resources of the university’s Academic Affairs Division to address the issue, beginning with the freshman