Responding to AI’s challenges to humanities education: a case study of teaching history with Reacting to the Past (RTTP) in US higher education

Generative AI has become commonplace in higher education around the world. However, as AI’s capabilities rapidly expand, humanities educators continue to grapple with fundamental questions about academic integrity, the role of human teachers and the relevance of humanities education in the age of AI. Drawing on my teaching experience at a large US public research university, this paper argues that Reacting to the Past (RTTP), an active-learning pedagogy based on historical role-playing games, offers a meaningful response to AI-related challenges in teaching general education courses in the humanities and provides humanities educators with a viable ‘third way’ that neither completely rejects AI nor indiscriminately embraces technological advancement. Compared with traditional lecture-based approaches, RTTP provides three advantages: it creates an AI-resistant learning environment that emphasises real-time participatory activities; cultivates fundamental skills that AI cannot replicate; and transforms the classroom into an intellectual community that focuses on peer-to-peer and student–teacher interaction.