Allison Das (The Kinkaid School)
The pandemic brought two things into sharp focus: first, the translation model may no longer work in the COVID era classroom or any Classics classroom of the 2020s. Second, Classics courses have an underutilized power to address current issues of race, inequity, colonialism, and contemporary DEI socio-politics.
In the first half of this paper, I discuss how the logistics of the COVID-era classroom convinced me to finally move from a pedagogy based on translation to a pedagogy based on diversity and comparative culture. It forced me to finally ask myself, if almost every student text from the Cambridge Latin Course to Vergil’s Aeneid exists online, is it realistic to ask students in the 2020s to translate chunks of Latin or Greek for homework or exams? Am I actually teaching language acquisition or simply tempting fate a bit too much with every assigned passage just a Google search away? And is translation even the most vital skill that Classics has to offer?
In my paper, I join a growing community of Classicists who are offering vibrant, unconventional alternatives to the translation-only model. While translation may always have a place in Classics curriculum, less of it can make Classics even more relevant and necessary across campuses. At the intro level, Classics can offer a deeper understanding of pre-modern Mediterranean societies and its languages as sociocultural phenomena. In particular, Classics can give students a more rigorous understanding of English. Its grammar and etymology but also its ancient roots and historic evolution. In more advanced classes, Classics can also give students a broader, millennia’s-old scope for analytical and critical thinking. Skills that can be applied across disciplines, from comparative literature to sociology, gender studies to biology, art to engineering.
Just as importantly, however, less translation can make space to address DEI issues. Issues that were as prevalent in the ancient world as they are now. Issues that—in the wake of Black Lives Matter and the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many other people of color—are issues that the pandemic has finally made us face. Issues that can no longer be ignored in Classics. This is especially clear to me as a Classicist who is a woman of color. In this context, the second half of my paper will argue that Classics can give a long-standing context to contemporary issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. It can give a valuable context to topics of race and systematic racism; religion and religious oppression; gender and sexism; sexuality and homophobia. By adopting Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of “intersectionality,” Classics can also tackle any number of these topics at once. It can face them head-on in the language and in the literature, in the ancient world and in 2021.
At the close of my paper, I’ll grapple with the difficulties of reorienting Classics curricula and welcome an open-ended dialogue on other places where we might focus our pedagogy instead of translation.