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Sponsored by the APA Committee on Education
Panel co-organizers, Ronnie Ancona and Eric Dugdale

What should we teach our classics program graduate students about pedagogy in the 21st century? What should we as pre-collegiate level teachers, graduate students, and professors know about pedagogy today? To teach successfully, is it enough to know the subject matter of our field or should we know something about the various ways and means of teaching it? Is pedagogy just something for pre-collegiate teachers to learn or is it something of value for all who teach or plan to teach? Those of us who went through Ph.D. programs almost certainly taught as teaching assistants and we may (or may not) have been given some training specific to the courses to which we were assigned. The purpose of this panel is to explore the nature of and reasoning behind pedagogy training in our field, primarily in Ph.D. programs, in an effort to determine some ways in which it might be expanded to the benefit of the profession as a whole.

The impetus for this panel was a recognition that learning about pedagogy has often been seen as primarily of importance to those preparing to teach at the pre-collegiate level. Yet Ph.D. students typically teach in graduate school and are preparing to be teachers as well scholars. Two panels at the 2011 Annual Meeting, one on the Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation (2010), and the other on Ph.D.s teaching at the pre-collegiate level, stressed the importance of classics teachers at all levels being trained in and made aware of classics pedagogy.