Theramenes had been missing for months when he burst into the Athenian Assembly with news from his negotiations with the Spartan general Lysander.

The Athenians were starving to death. A Spartan army surrounded their city, as it had for the past 27 years. Whatever Theramenes had to say would hold great sway over the assembly.

He had critical news to share with the Athenian Assembly, which was gathered in the Kates Center on Ashland University’s campus, because the role-playing game the 15 people in the building were participating in required it.

The Center for Teaching excellence, which just opened its doors at the start of the school year, was hosting a Reacting to the Past game Tuesday (Sept. 22), directed by John Moser, a professor of history. The game, Athens Besieged, was offered as a chance to introduce the five professors in the room the chance to see how they might use games like this one in their classrooms.

“I was excited when I heard about the Center,” Moser said. “If there was ever an opportunity to promote a radical teaching method, this is it.”

Diane Bonfiglio, an associate professor of psychology, is the Center’s first director.

“It really came from a place of looking at what we have in terms of faculty development and trying to take it another step forward,” she said. “A lot of our focus on faculty development has been on funding for things like conference attendance and research presentation, and we really saw an area that we would like to expand into that focuses back on pedagogy. We are a university where teaching is first and we care about that very deeply, but what we found is we had moved away from a lot of intentional development around teaching and pedagogy.”

The Center’s purpose isn’t to replace the work that professors are doing in their fields, Bonfiglio said.

“That stuff is very valuable,” she said, “Doing that kind of work makes us better teachers in the classroom. To be able to continue to stay engaged in our scholarship is very important so we can talk to our students about those things and to help them move forward in their work, but the Center is much more focused on getting workshops up and things like that to be available here.”

Christina Fuhrmann, a professor of music, attended the game to satisfy the curiosity she’s had about the games for a while.

Having both faculty and students together was helpful, she said, since she got to understand how students participate in the game, both by watching and by participating herself.

That sort of opportunity is exactly what Bonfiglio thinks the Center should be doing.

“Partly what the Center will accomplish is it gives people an opportunity to get together, to expand their knowledge about different teaching methods and discuss ways to reach their students better,” Bonfiglio said.