Beth Severy-Hoven
By the end of the summer of 2018, the Severy-Hoven intermediate Latin textbook The Satyrica of Petronius (2014) will have been the focus of two NEH Summer Seminars for K-12 teachers, a blog maintained by John Gruber-Miller at Cornell College, and many college courses. A new Open Educational Resource collects teaching materials generated in these multiple venues to make them accessible to all. In this poster session or talk, I will present some of the site and these materials, as well as describe the process whereby such materials are publicly shared.
First, the materials. In the summer of 2016, Matthew Panciera directed a summer seminar for K-12 Latin teachers at Gustavus Adolphus College funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and entitled Roman Daily Life. Panciera and guest professors Rebecca Benefiel, Jeremy Hartnett and Beth Severy-Hoven led reading and discussion of the Satyrica, Pompeian graffiti and other forms of evidence for daily activities in ancient Italy. Meanwhile the sixteen participants developed projects for use in their own classes based on this group work. These projects include PowerPoint presentations on Roman trades, Augustales and the goddess Pudicitia; activities such as making Roman food, building villas and staging a Roman wedding; an assignment that guides students through research on historical figures; and pre- and post-reading activities such as a visual telling of the werewolf story in the Satyrica. All of the 2016 participants have been invited to share their creations on the OER site, as will those who attend the three-week seminar this coming summer. Already included is the work of John-Gruber Miller, who in 2016 composed an extensive blog of his work and that of his students: Making the Leap: Developing Communicative and Cultural Activities for Petronius’ Satyrica (http://blogs.cornellcollege.edu/jgrubermiller/2016/06/22/making-the-leap-developing-communicative-and-cultural-activities-for-petronius-satyrica/). Gruber-Miller shares a set of pre- and post-reading activities tagged to specific chapters in the Severy-Hoven textbook, as well as Prezi presentations that visually review clusters of vocabulary. Finally, the OER includes a mechanism whereby other instructors can submit their work, and we are hoping to collect a variety of sample syllabi in particular.
Second, the method of distribution. A variety of platforms is available in the emerging technological landscape of Open Educational Resources, and I will describe the process whereby the host platform was chosen from the most common options, such as Merlot and OER Commons. I will also describe the means of protecting intellectual work used on the site, including forms of Creative Commons licenses that allow instructors not only to use but also to adapt and create new pedagogical materials based on what has been shared.
In the early days of teaching with the internet, rich resources became available to the high school and college Latin instructor. Course webpages made the textbook choices, syllabi, assignments, and activities of experienced Latin teachers broadly available. More recently, these materials have been hidden behind courseware like Blackboard and Moodle, and each instructor is again left to re-invent the wheel in designing courses, materials and activities. The OER movement, this site and this poster/presentation aim to bring these resources back to an open forum of teaching and learning.