Revising the Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation: Ideas and Suggestions

This presentation shares ideas based on the personal experiences of a twenty-year Latin program coordinator who works closely with a FLTE program accredited for state licensure. The central topics include what the program advocates for pre-service teachers, opportunities the standards revision process affords to highlight areas that need attention, and some methods this program has found effective.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the need for classics teacher training in outreach and recruitment which aligns with current societal interest in STEM and mythology. In the 2010 version of Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation, Section 3 states that beginning Latin teachers should “make their programs and the excitement of classical antiquity known to a wider community beyond the classroom.” In classics in particular, this area of training needs emphasis due to dwindling numbers of students studying classics at every level.

When students ponder their goals for Latin class, many of them offer some variation of “the ability to speak fluently,” a lofty goal for middle school students, and one that is distinctly not related to, “read Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum with an eye to rhetoric.” The three-year pandemic has changed middle-school students in many ways, for example leaving many tuned-in online and yet isolated from their peers.

As a participant of this panel, I will be offering insights from my perspective as a practicing Latin teacher in a diverse public school. While the current standards are quite comprehensive, my purpose is to explore opportunities for improvement during the revision process. I identify these opportunities as related to the following two realities.

The status-quo of Latin K-12 pedagogy can be characterized as diversity of methods with occasional disagreement about which are most effective and inclusive. The truth is that no one method is a panacea, and teacher education programs should offer students an introduction to the panoply of approaches (CI, Communicative Latin, G-T, to name three) from which s/he may select the techniques that best suit the particular class. My remarks in this panel will be to focus on one of these approaches, alternately called Communicative or Active Latin.