material and documents related to the case.
The site went online in 2016 and since then thousands of visitors have worked their way through the trial engine, with the results all recorded in our database. Once the site was functioning properly, we combined it with a new trials-based exercise intended for the undergraduate classroom.
RESTAGING A HISTORICAL TRIAL
The mock trial exercise was staged initially with a second-year history class consisting of approximately a hundred students, who were divided into five tutorials of around twenty students each. We assigned individual roles to each of the students: three were judges, two were witnesses for the prosecution, two were witnesses for the defense, three were part of the legal team for the prosecution, three for the defense team, and the remaining students were assigned as researchers for the two sides. For the roles, allocations, and responsibilities, see table 5.1.
Figure 5.1. The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial website.
Table 5.1. Roles, Allocations, and Responsibilities for History Class Activity
| Role | Allocations | Responsibilities |
| Attorney/Barrister | Three for prosecutionThree for defense | Prepare a briefing on key exhibitsInterview witnesses during pretrial preparationOpening statementsExamination and cross-examination of witnessesClosing statements |
| Researcher | Three for prosecutionThree for defense | Review and analyze evidencePrepare briefing papers for barristersDevelop overall strategyProvide additional evidence and suggestions through the trial via notes |
| Witness | Two for prosecutionTwo for defense | Research a specific historical characterWork with either the prosecution or the defenseDeliver testimony before the court and undergo questioning |
| Judge | Three to four total | Prepare for the trial, develop familiarity with the legal system of the periodKeep order in the court, oversee barristersAsk questions of barristers and witnessesDeliver a verdictPrepare a written justification |
The mock trial exercise ran across three weeks. The first week was devoted to research and preparation as students started to work through the key materials. During the second week, this process continued but the legal teams were also required to present oral arguments before the judges. These centered on a number of controversial exhibits including a legal justification of waterboarding prepared by a VOC official and an unverified note smuggled out from the original trial. The question before the judges was whether these exhibits, which significantly strengthened one of the two sides, should be admitted into the record. In this way, their inclusion or exclusion had the capacity to alter the overall course of the trial. In the third week, we staged the trial itself, which was divided into five stages: opening statements, witnesses for the prosecution, witnesses for the defense, closing statements, and verdict. When the trial concluded, the judges prepared a written statement explaining their verdict.
RESULTS
Although it required some initial explanation, the exercise proved highly successful. By tapping into students’ competitive instincts, it generated a high level of engagement. Students who had previously been reluctant to look closely at weekly readings were willing to devote long hours outside the classroom to the case. Both the prosecution and the defense organized extensive meetings outside tutorial time to work through content, devise arguments, and prepare their legal strategies. This level of engagement extended across all four groups: researchers worked through all the documents on the website and then searched for further evidence; witnesses engaged deeply with their characters; legal teams prepared eloquent written statements and practiced their delivery; and the judges delved into the legal systems of the period and mastered the arcane rules regulating the use of torture in the seventeenth century. The overall experience proved enormously gratifying for us as instructors, and many students singled it out as the high point of the class.
IS IT REPLICABLE?
We believe this model can be easily replicated in a wide range of classroom settings. The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial started as a stand-alone website before we added a mock trial exercise. While the site is relatively sophisticated, it is also not strictly necessary for this exercise. On the most basic level, the trial exercise relies on a close reading of testimonies and legal documents. All that would be needed for the model to be replicated is a web page or even a simple online forum, such as Dropbox or a Google Drive folder, where a set of trial documents can be accessed. In our experience, the key is to place large amounts of information online but then to rely on students’ competitive instincts to drive first independent investigation and then classroom discussion, hence making the most of limited time.
While the Amboyna trial exercise lends itself well to classes on the history of commodities or European expansion in Asia, there is no shortage of other trials with long paper trails that would serve equally well for a similar exercise. With relatively limited preparation, the Teaching with Trials model could be applied to diverse trials throughout history. Equally, there is no reason it could not be used for disciplines beyond history as the trial format could be applied to a wide range of subject material.
A review by Michael Prince of the literature on active learning reveals a consensus on the importance of interactive engagement and how it can improve student learning outcomes by facilitating a more hands-on learning experience.2 As Richard Hake notes, interactive engagement is designed to “promote conceptual understanding through active engagement of students in heads-on (always) and hands-on (usually) activities which yield immediate feedback through discussion with peers and/or instructors.”3 Enabling student engagement requires teachers to create an environment in which there are repeated opportunities for students to interact both with their instructors and with their peers, all the time receiving continual feedback as they work through problems.4 While the importance and value of the flipped classroom has long been noted, detailed studies have been confined mainly to the sciences, with far less research in the humanities.5 As a result, there are fewer proven templates available for educators looking to flip the humanities classroom. We believe that the model sketched out in this chapter both is easily replicable and has multiple advantages. By using an accessible interdisciplinary approach that combines digital humanities with history and law, Teaching with Trials encourages active learning by students through ongoing collaboration with their peers while also promoting a deeper engagement with primary source materials. In particular, the model encourages students to engage in targeted research and develops their critical analysis skills by requiring them to closely examine a wide variety of sources in order to formulate a persuasive argument for their respective sides.
Our experiment with Teaching with Trials proved highly successful. Combining digital humanities platforms with the flipped classroom approach provides, we believe, an excellent means of engaging students and making the most of class time.
NOTES
1. Adam Clulow, Amboina 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
2. Michael Prince, “Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research,” Journal of Engineering Education 93, no. 3 (2004): 223–231.
3. Richard Hake, “Interactive-Engagement versus Traditional Methods: A Six-Thousand-Student Survey of Mechanics Test Data for Introductory Physics Courses,” American Journal of Physics 66, no. 1 (1998): 64–74.
4. Todd Davis and Patricia Murrell, “A Structural Model of Perceived Academic, Personal and Vocational Gains Related to College Student Responsibility,” Research in Higher Education 34, no. 3 (1993): 267–289.
5. For example, see Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson, “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Educations,”
