Evan Dutmer (Culver Academies)
Jan Amos Komenský (1592-1670), better known as Comenius, is widely considered to be one of the first and most important systematic European educational reformers. His student-centered pedagogy is generally held to be among the first ‘progressive’ teaching models adopted on a wide scale in the Early Modern era. He is best known for his Orbis Sensualium Pictus (“The Visible World in Pictures”), thought to be the first picture book intended for children in the European tradition.
Far from a mere artifact in the history of education, the Orbis Pictus presents exciting teaching and learning possibilities to the practicing Latin teacher and a clear vision for teaching Latin reading to young people. The Orbis Pictus was intended as both an encyclopedia of the world for young children and as a Latin learning tool. But it taught Latin without a supplemental grammar, rule memorization, or exercises—it taught via simple one-to-one linguistic mapping between things in the world and Latin words. Then, it connected understood Latin words and sentences with the natural language of the young person reading (the Orbis Pictus was translated into numerous European languages in its extensive publication lifespan). The Orbis, then, contains copious amounts of what would today be called ‘comprehensible input’ in Second Language Acquisition—simple Latin meant to communicate messages about the world to its readers.
In this presentation I introduce and situate Comenius’s Latin language pedagogy in the history of Latin education and especially reading-based approaches, motivate his vision for good Latin education as principally education in joyful Latin reading, and show how the Orbis Pictus can be used and manipulated for the uses of a contemporary Latin teacher, especially for the purposes of providing comprehensible Latin on numerous everyday subjects (the sky, earth, weather, animals, fish, school subjects, parts of the home, baking, beekeeping, writing, playing outside, music, reading, painting, planets, stars, food, etc.). I include examples from my own teaching practice and student output in Latin from my classes collected on process and performance assessments delivered after exposure to the Orbis Pictus. The result, I think, will be exciting evidence of this text’s continuing relevance for Latin language acquisition and an important early modern predecessor to today’s SLA-inspired Latin teaching methods.