ABSTRACT
This essay focuses on the course : “Pirates: Truth and Legend,” which explores the golden age of piracy from roughly 1550 to 1750. In this Freshman Seminar (general education) class, students are themselves immersed in experiential history and eventually deliver an immersive learning experience to the campus community. The class begins with a quick survey of pirates in popular culture, then transitions into the “real” historical context of piracy. The students are divided into “crews” in which they must learn the skills and knowledge they would need to be a seventeenth-century pirate. Through a semester-long role-play game, they design characters and environments which are then used in a final event performance. This essay offers advice for developing coursework structured around immersion and experiential learning which could be used in different disciplinary perspectives.
