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.

It can be challenging to bring material culture to life in the classroom when the cultures that produced those materials are separated from the students by time and space. Students learning about Roman history and culture often find it difficult to work with and critically analyse non-literary sources as they rarely have the opportunity to engage with the material objects themselves. Depending on the size of the class, or materials available, it may be impossible to introduce such sources for the ancient world into classroom teaching.

The educational value of play has long been acknowledged. During recent decades, much attention has been paid to video games and the multifarious ways in which they can promote and enhance learning. My main objective in this study is to weave game principles, learning and the notion of playfulness into assessment principles, in an attempt to investigate how what I call ‘Game-Informed Playful Assessment’ (GIPA) can affect student learning and particularly students’ experience of learning. The GIPA was designed with a view to promoting students’ agency, autonomy, collaboration and playfulness, and was introduced in an undergraduate course on archaic Greek lyric poetry at a Greek-speaking university. My data was generated through in-depth interviews with ten of the students that attended the course. While the GIPA was favourably and even enthusiastically received by students, the research also brought to the fore several other issues that call for attention, such as the stress that innovative assessment may provoke in students and the readiness of students to be playful within an academic framework that typically contrasts serious work with playfulness and play in general.

It is safe to say that, across the globe, translation is still heavily relied on as a tool for teaching classical languages and texts that are written in them, both in secondary and higher education. Indeed, translation exercises are perhaps the most common method to train and evaluate Greek and Latin text comprehension, grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Some teachers and textbooks also make use of existing translations to complement and supplement the (more or less) original texts that they are tackling in class. Given that translation plays such a prominent role in Classics, is it not remarkable, then, that students generally spend very little time reflecting on the act of translation itself, not just as a shift between different languages, but as a transfer and transformation of meaning and form between different cultures?

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.

In an article, ‘The Slaves were Happy’: High School Latin and the Horrors of Classical Studies, Erik Robinson, a Latin teacher from a public high school in Texas, criticises how, in his experience, Classics teaching tends to avoid in-depth discussions on issues such as the brutality of war, the treatment of women and the experience of slaves (Robinson, 2017). However, texts such as the article ‘Teaching Sensitive Topics in the Secondary Classics Classroom’ (Hunt, 2016), and the book ‘From abortion to pederasty: addressing difficult topics in the Classics classroom’ (Sorkin Rabinowitz & McHardy, 2014) strongly advocate for teachers to address these difficult and sensitive topics. They argue that the historical distance between us and Greco-Roman culture and history can allow students to engage and participate in discussions that may otherwise be difficult and can provide a valuable opportunity to address uncomfortable topics in the classroom. Thus, Robinson's assertion that Classics teaching avoids these sensitive topics may not be so definitive. Regardless, Robinson claims that honest confrontations in the classroom with the ‘legacy of horror and abuse’ from the ancient world can be significantly complicated by many introductory textbooks used in Latin classes, such as the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC), one of the most widely used high school Latin textbooks in use in both America and the United Kingdom (Robinson, 2017). In particular, Robinson views the presentation of slavery within the CLC as ‘rather jocular and trivialising’ which can then hinder a reader's perspective on the realities of the violent and abusive nature of the Roman slave trade (Robinson, 2017). As far as he was concerned, the problem lay with the characterisation of the CLC's slave characters Grumio and Clemens, who, he argued, were presented there as happy beings and seemingly unfazed by their positions as slaves. There was never any hint in the book that Grumio or Clemens were unhappy with their lives or their positions as slaves, even though, as the CLC itself states in its English background section on Roman slavery, Roman law ‘did not regard slaves as human beings, but as things that could be bought or sold, treated well or badly, according to the whim of their master’ (CLC I, 1998, p. 78). One might argue, therefore, that there seems to be a disconnect between the English language information we learn about the brutality of the Roman slave trade provided in the background section of Stage 6, and what we can infer about Roman slavery from the Latin language stories involving our two ‘happy’ slaves.

On 19th March 2020, the Deputy First Minister of Scotland and Cabinet Secretary for Education John Swinney reported to the Scottish Parliament that, in light of the global coronavirus pandemic, schools across Scotland would close from 20th March, mirroring the policy of the UK government announced by the Secretary of State for Education Gavin Williamson the previous day. As part of this closure, Swinney announced that there would be no examinations set for the 2019-20 session, and that the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) would instead enact a certification model employing coursework, teacher estimates of grades and evidence of prior achievement. In outlining the Scottish Government's plan to Holyrood, the Deputy First Minister declared: ‘It is a measure of the gravity of the challenge we now face that the exams will not go ahead this year. With the support of the wider education system, a credible certification model can be put in place that can command confidence in the absence of the exam diet – to ensure that young people in our schools and colleges who through no fault of their own are unable to sit exams, are not disadvantaged.’ (Scottish Government, 2020).

The Classical Association Teaching Board (CATB) surveyed Classics teachers in the United Kingdom from 20th August to 9th September 2020 to gauge views about the impact on teaching of the national lockdown during the covid-19 pandemic. 164 teachers from both the state and independent sectors completed the survey. There were three areas of focus in the survey. First, the impact on pupils of the grade awarding process after the cancellation of GCSE and A Level examinations in 2020. Second, how confident teachers were in preparing for the 2021 examinations after the loss of five months of face-to-face teaching. Third, reactions to Ofqual's consultation process on changes to the format of the 2021 examinations. This article brings together the responses to the survey and details how the unprecedented closure of schools affected the teaching of Classics. It will also explain how the CATB continues to support Classics teachers and the teaching of classical subjects in UK schools.

An article by Jerome Moran entitled ‘Spoken Latin in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance’ was published in the Journal of Classics Teaching in the autumn of 2019 (Moran, 2019). The author of the article contends that ‘actual real-life conversations in Latin about everyday matters’ never, or almost never took place among educated people in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. A long-standing familiarity with quite a few primary sources for the Latin culture of Renaissance and early modern period leads us to a rather different conclusion. The present essay, therefore, revisits the main topics treated by Moran.

On April 6th 2020 Steven Hunt wrote in Ad Familiares about the relative preparedness of Classics for distance-learning in a time of coronavirus (Hunt 2020). He wrote, ‘Classics continues to thrive online, buzzing up and down the wires, zapping through the air, and into countless homes through computer screen, laptop, ipad and smartphone.’ (Hunt 2020). Pointing to over two decades of intentional investment in an online, digital world for Classics and Classics learning in the UK and US, Hunt concludes: ‘So now, with the challenges before us of having to teach remotely using the internet, Latinists are already digital natives: students know how to find the materials, use them efficiently, and learn.’

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.

In addition to the ‘Key words’ at the head of the article that are provided for online searches, there are a number of other terms that may be regarded as key words in Theory, i.e. terms that tend to recur in works of Theory, works about Theory, and works that employ Theory, terms by which the presence of Theory may be recognised. Many of these are French (or German) words that an English rendering may not fully explicate. Also, they cannot be fully understood outside the context in which they are used, which is a necessary limitation on books about Theory, necessary though these are for beginners. (Wittgenstein famously said that one should not ask for the meaning of a term but look for the use.)

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.

The Warwick Classics Network (WCN) was created in July 2018 with funding from the Warwick Widening Participation Development Fund and the Warwick Impact Fund. Further funding from Widening Participation (WP) and the charity Classics for All secured the continuation of the position of Research Fellow in Outreach and Impact for the Dept. of Classics and Ancient History, a role given to Dr Paul Grigsby; WP funding was also used to cover the expenses of events such as our 2nd July 2018 WCN Launch event and the 2019 Warwick Ancient Drama Festival. For the period April 2019-April 2020 the WCN received further funding from WP, Classics for All, and the A. G. Leventis Foundation, and this report will detail the activities that this funding supported.

This article began as a blog post with the title ‘Grammar-Translation: Not Really A Method…’ (Piantaggini, 2020). Of course, that choice of title was intended to hook the reader rather than actually make such a claim. Without a doubt, Grammar-translation (GT) is a language teaching method recognised for its historical significance (Musumeci, 1997), its role amongst other emerging language teaching methods (Shrum & Glisan, 2005), as well as its shortcomings (Richards & Rodgers, 2014). This article investigates the method, and its effect on teachers and students.

Ancient Herstories aims to tell the stories of women from the ancient world: the good, the bad and the ugly. It is a blog developed by Maria Haley and Elinor Cosgrave, who became frustrated at the male-centred history modules they had encountered while teaching.