In spite of its world-wide reach, the International Baccalaureate (IB) is still a relatively unknown quantity in many schools in the UK. Even if teachers know of the IB, very few teachers know how it works and even fewer have actually taught it. As a result, not enough Classicists realise how beneficial the IB can be for the teaching of Latin. This article aims at highlighting three main reasons why Classics teachers should be championing the International Baccalaureate in their sixth forms.

In this paper, I explore the use of long-term, hands-on learning activities for Classics courses. I will show that a carefully designed project can complement classroom lectures on Greek and Roman culture and contribute towards the development of students’ critical thinking and group work skills. As an example, I describe a successful hands-on learning project that I designed for my Ancient Greek Cities course at Monmouth College (USA). The students were tasked with researching and building an historically faithful, ancient Greek mudbrick building for the college's annual Classics Day event. With the success of this project in my class, I will show that Classics instructors can pursue similar long-term, hands-on learning activities for engaging students in ancient Greek and Roman culture and teaching essential skills.

Last autumn, Hereford Cathedral School began an after-school Greek Club open to state-school pupils from across Hereford. This article aims to provide some ideas about what works and how best to foster interest in Greek and Greek culture.

We are now in our second year of Latin teaching at Lionheart Trust and it's fair to say that it has grown substantially as an initiative. The idea to teach Latin as an extra-curricular subject grew from our very positive experience of running Classics Clubs after school for Year 7s. These clubs were based on Greek and Roman mythology, local archaeology (plentiful given we are based in Leicester, a Roman city) and a little bit of Latin. The children loved all of these experiences and we realised quite quickly that there was an appetite for greater Latin teaching.

The recent general election has exposed the danger inherent in vote-based democracies – that they inevitably entail large disaffected minorities being excluded from executive power. The ancient Greek inventors of democracy vigorously debated this issue, having painful historical experience of it (recorded by Thucydides) and theoretical solutions (discussed by Aristotle). Yet our state educational system almost completely deprives our secondary-school children of the opportunity to think about democracy afforded by the dazzling thought-world of the ancient Greeks. This is despite the availability of excellent translations of all their writings – free online – into modern English.

Classics as a discipline was the bedrock of an elite education in the UK for some time. To some minds, it still holds on to that position, not least because there is a certain mystique and aura around the two dominant languages of early Europe and their literature. The discipline of learning these languages, so the argument went, could improve our ability to analyse questions, and think about our own language, thereby increasing our potential in future life. This sort of intellectual exercise was said to be valuable: by learning a language which we could not actually use in day-to-day life, we could also learn other, modern languages more effectively, and we could sharpen our minds to face the challenges of the world in front of us.

In June 2019 the Classics for All Hubs in the North of England (Blackpool, Liverpool, Durham/North-East England and Manchester/Leeds) met together in Leeds and agreed to combine our forces, rebranding ourselves as Classics for All North. The intention was to create a stronger presence in the North for schools and teachers of classical subjects and to share events and planning. We now have a combined Classics for All North website (https://classicsforallnorth.org.uk/) and social media presence (Twitter handle @ClassicsNorth, Instagram @CfANorth), we produce a combined quarterly newsletter and, where practical, share events and planning. It also means that schools that fall between our hubs or outside our metropolitan centres can feel more included. As we have set up our hubs and got to know teachers, a common difficulty has been raised: a feeling that so much that happens in the Classics world happens in London and the South. We are trying hard to change that. As individual hubs it can be difficult to make an impact. Individual numbers of schools in one area may be too small to run a Teach Meet event, but by combining them and running them across the whole region, we are able to accomplish more and our local schools are noticing more what we have to offer. Of course, our individual hubs are still busy in their own areas, recruiting new schools and training teachers.

Students are arriving to study Latin at university with an increasingly diverse range of qualifications (including no Latin at all). This is something to celebrate. University Classics departments want students from different educational backgrounds; and we want a wide range of qualification authorities to continue to offer students the chance to start learning Latin at school. This diversity is being exacerbated, however, by an increasingly stark differential in the content and rigour of these various qualifications; and that presents challenges for universities aiming to integrate students quickly and acclimatise them to university-style learning. Classes in all subjects have more and less knowledgeable students learning side-by-side; but the dynamics of a Latin language class mean that gaps in knowledge and differences in experience become publicly visible very quickly. This is thus a social problem as much as it is an academic one, and it is particularly acute during that important period of transition, the first year of university study. This trend is not exclusive to the teaching of Latin but has also been a recurring theme of discussion within Modern Languages too, particularly in Scottish universities where the percentage of non-A Level students is higher than is generally the case south of the border.

This piece originated as an article in In Medias Res on 29 May 2020 and has been updated for the Journal of Classics Teaching. The author would like to acknowledge the helpful feedback from the editors at In Medias Res and The Journal of Classics Teaching on earlier drafts of this essay. Their suggestions helped produce a superior piece.

Charlayne Allan's conclusion in her 1986 work, ‘Images of Women’ calls for a transformation in the inclusion and presentation of women in Classics educational materials. However, 33 years later, the presentation of women in educational textbooks remains a prevalent issue in many countries today with slow progress being made (BBC, 2017). The discipline of Classics has been criticised for being particularly slow in addressing the issue of gender bias in textbooks, both ensuring that there is a female voice in educational materials and also responding to female scholarship (Churchill, 2006, p.86). There has been some criticism of the popular and widely-used Cambridge Latin Course with the suggestion that ancient women are not equally or fairly represented through the characters and storylines used in the textbooks (Churchill, 2006; Upchurch, 2013). The course was first written in the 1970s and so, perhaps understandably, lacks strong female characters which might suit the engagement of students of the modern world. One solution which has been proposed by the critics mentioned above is the re-designing of the course with a more equal gender balance. However, I am unsure as to whether this is the best way forward. The re-designing of an entire textbook course (and all its online resources, etc.) is a complex undertaking, especially as the CLC has been carefully constructed around a continuous storyline. The creation of female characters, who would have a real significance to students’ learning and understanding of the Roman world, cannot simply be added into the stories without significantly changing the course (Joffe, 2019). Moreover, the way in which women are depicted in the CLC should not merely be a numerical matter. Consideration of how best to accurately present and teach students about the experiences of women in the Roman world, bearing in mind the Roman patriarchal way of thinking, could be endangered to achieve a mathematical solution for gender balance. The success of the CLC is largely down to its popular storylines and characters and so, for the purposes of my research, I will focus on the balance between the importance of an engaging storyline and at the same time, ensuring that the lives of ancient women are accurately presented through the female characters.

This article describes the ways in which four non-specialist Latin teachers are introducing Latin to their schools1. The interviews reported here took place in four secondary schools in London and the South-East in 2019. The interviews were informal and were held with the teachers while I was consultant on behalf of the charity Classics for All while training non-specialists to introduce Latin into their schools, where no classical subjects had been offered previously. Teachers use Latin to meet Ofsted targets for the uptake of the English Baccalaureate (henceforth EBacc2) and to provide a broad and ambitious curriculum for all students. Resources and subject knowledge provide intellectual challenge and also stimulation. In conclusion I recommend greater support from the Department for Education (DfE) working with subject organisations to develop a coherent strategy for introducing classical subjects in state-maintained schools in order to support DfE and Ofsted objectives.

This study originates from my curiosity to explore a different Latin teaching approach to address some students’ misconception that Latin is an unnecessarily complicated language that no one speaks anymore.

This research studies whether different types of motivation have an effect on students' attitudes towards their own ability and success. This is assessed through a comparison of process goals and performance goals within a series of lessons, terms which have been adapted from the research of Dweck & Leggett (1988), amongst others as cited in the literature review. A study of such research has revealed that generally intrinsic motivation as ‘doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable’ is preferable (Ryan & Deci, 2000, p. 55), and that this is encouraged through a focus on the process of an activity rather than an ultimate goal. The main issue here is whether students work more effectively if this goal is not made obvious to them during a lesson. The suggested benefit of focussing on process rather than performance is that students are encouraged to recognise enjoyment in each task, so that they spend time and effort improving their skills. In contrast a performance focus increases the chances of choosing an easy task or rushing through a piece of work in order to obtain the results expected (Dweck, 1999). Furthermore performance feedback seems more summative and less helpful for future work (Corpus & Lepper, 2007); comments such as “Well done you did it !” provide nothing useful, while process feedback reflects upon skills which can be applied repeatedly.

This study took place in a Year 7 class in a selective mixed independent school and examines the use of learning strategies for Latin vocabulary. The students were asked how they normally learn vocabulary, and these results using their normal method are compared to the results of using three different strategies.

Classroom dialogue provides significant opportunity for students to build on their understanding of a subject. It is also a vector through which the educator can assess progress in their lessons (Alexander, 2008). The purpose of this study was to explore what effect a specific form of classroom dialogue (the Socratic seminar) has on student engagement, and consequently, their learning.

The aim of this contribution is to present an innovative approach to the use of Open Access AI in teaching the Classical era at high school and university level. The paper first explains the growing interest in AI technology and its main applications in the subjects of philology, history and other related areas. The following sections show the different steps of the proposal, which uses the Midjourney program, as well as its pros and cons.

Latin is no longer the exclusive dominion of the elite. The Latin language is now accessible to all types of students as a result of the shift towards the use of Comprehensible Input in the Latin classroom. Part of making Latin accessible to the many involves divorcing oneself from limiting beliefs about what constitutes content in the Latin classroom. Enter Blaine Ray and Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS).

This case study will describe a project undertaken with 2nd year students on a three year BA QTS course to learn and then teach elementary Latin in Key Stage 2. There were 22 students, 11 of whom are studying modern foreign languages (MfL) as their specialism, and the other 11, English. The inspiration for this came from a Primary Latin Taster Day for Liverpool teachers run by the Classics for All-funded Liverpool Classics Hub in February 2017, and we would like to thank Alice Case and Sue Balmer amongst others for many of the ideas that we used.