Lightning Talks 1: Pedagogy

Why should students design a course? I share a case study of a multi-level Latin and Roman culture course in which students drafted a democratic syllabus, crafted individual learning charters, created assignments, assembled portfolios, deeply reflected on their learning, and navigated a grade-less semester. These adaptable techniques encouraged student agency, cultivated introspection, and fostered a culture of transformative learning.

Open access online Greek and Latin pedagogy reaches students who would never appear in our traditional—and shrinking—classrooms. The work of developing those resources fits, fairly well, in the workload of employed college faculty. But are we developing ourselves out of our jobs? This talks aims to probe models for retaining accessibility while also compensating us for the work.

Incorporating accessible and engaging framing tools from the field of conflict analysis and resolution, such as needs/fears charts, conflict maps, etc., can enhance students’ engagement with both primary and secondary evidence. These tools facilitate an active, problem-solving approach enabling students to discern better and more independently a given conflict’s component parts, relationship to context, and key differences between competing accounts.

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is a sociolinguistic theoretical framework and methodology in education. This brand of discourse analysis is effective for articulating and addressing how societal systems such as racism and sexism are realized through visual and verbal communication. Using examples from textbooks and the classroom, I will demonstrate the potential for this approach in classics pedagogy.

This presentation will be a report on teaching the first two semesters of Ancient Greek at the college level for credit in a completely online format. The textbook is entirely digital and online. All assessments are automated quizzes in a course management system. Presentation and discussion can cover enrollments, formats, challenges and advantages.

Here, I share my own experiences using graphic novels (e.g. Gonick’s Cartoon History, Rea’s Perpetua’s Journey) in the classroom—either as the main textbook or one of several, and in both upper- and lower-level classes. What are the gains in student engagement and how do we capitalize on them? What do we lose in quantity of content? What next?

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.

Classics education is enjoying a resurgence in British high school classrooms. This development is the direct result of a number of key initiatives to raise the profile, currency and status of Classical Studies for 21^st century learners. This paper will share the scope, shape and scale of strategies which have successfully reintegrated Classics to British educational policy and practice during the period 2014-2018.