The place Generative AI (Gen AI) has within education and schooling has been subject to much scrutiny. Its ever-evolving and growing nature has left many educators and other stakeholders scrambling with questions about how to adapt its approach, methodology and place within the classroom. Gen AI has also been shown to have particularly efficacy in the area of Classical languages teaching. It also has challenges (Ross, 2023). The following paper explores a proactive approach to utilising Gen AI technology and programs within a Latin classroom NESA Stage 4-5/ MYP Years 1-3 in Australia (ages 11-16) (NESA: New South Wales Education Standards Authority. MYP: Middle Years Programme). It also develops some approaches to facilitate students’ reflection so as to improve their understanding of the uses and abuses of Gen AI platforms in their own learning.

This article follows a session on ‘Using AI in the Classics Classroom’ delivered at the University of Cambridge Mentors’ Day for the Classics PGCE (Initial Teacher Education programme). The first half of the article provides a brief introduction to how generative AI operates and the impact AI has had on education in the UK. In addition, this section considers the advantages of AI for educators in supporting PGCE students and early career teachers, aiding with planning and resource creation as well as the advantages for pupils. It also sets out practical limitations such as AI hallucinations, biases, database limitations, data protection concerns, and the potential risks of pupils developing reliance on AI usage and how teachers can avoid this. The second half of this article provides guidance and examples of how teachers can use AI to support their workload outside of the classroom and for using AI with pupils in the classroom. This includes advice on how to improve AI prompts, example prompts, and prompt scaffolds, as well as recommendations of AI tools for teachers to use in the classroom.

We developed and trained a custom AI text classifier to assist Latin language learners in internalising idioms, with a focus on Ciceronian composition. Idioms are mostly language-, sometimes author-specific expressions that cannot be translated directly into another language. The classifier provides interactive feedback on learners' output, effectively gamifying the process of writing in Latin and motivating students to produce more linguistic output. This not only helps learners build confidence, but also acquire a ‘toolbox’ of idioms useful for both output- and input-based activities. We present the results of our experiment conducted across a number of secondary classes in Switzerland. Our tool is freely available at https://latin-ia.hepl.ch/classifier.

Teaching ancient literature in translation is increasingly common across schools and universities; however, there has been limited discussion of pedagogical approaches towards, specifically, translated literature. I discuss the findings of a study conducted on first-year undergraduates at Oxford University, who analysed translations of the Iliad as part of a taught course. The publication of Wilson (2023) offers an opportunity to see how students respond to very recent translations. I explore the pitfalls students encounter when analysing poetry in translation and the ways educators, whether in high schools or universities, can help students negotiate these pitfalls and develop a more sophisticated understanding of literary translation. In particular, I discuss how a student’s level of familiarity with the Greek language affects the ways they analyse translations, and how educators can encourage students with little or no Greek to engage with translations successfully.

The study concerns the use made by Year 8 pupils of Latin using the ‘Explorer’ digital learning tool (part of the digital learning resources of the Cambridge Latin Course). Through close attention to transcripts of students working in pairs using the tool, which provides vocabulary and language analysis of continuous Latin prose narratives, the author notes its value in promoting inter-pupil discussion and collaborative learning. Recommendations include that teachers should consider the positive value of the tool as a means to promote discussion, but that pupils also need to be taught how to use the language analyser.

Virtual Reality is regularly heralded as a tool which will revolutionise teaching and education, yet little research has been done into its use and, in particular, into its use with secondary school students. Through a case study of a Year 13 Classical Civilisation class this article investigates student perceptions of the use of Virtual Reality in the Classics classroom and its impact upon their learning. This study demonstrated students' positive attitudes towards the use of Virtual Reality and that it appeared to have a positive and lasting impact upon their understanding of Ancient Greek sanctuaries. The study is limited in its scale – both in terms of student numbers and time period – but it can, I hope, offer encouragement for greater use of, and research into, Virtual Reality within the secondary Classics classroom.

This article presents an adaptation of the recent e-portfolio learning strategy, named Χαρτοφυλάκιον in ancient Greek and Scrinium in Latin, which significantly enhances the learning and assessment of classical languages in a philosophical academic setting. Developed at the University of La Sabana, this approach synergises constructivist and experiential learning theories to actively involve students in their educational journey, encouraging deeper engagement with the acquisition of ancient Greek and Latin. The e-portfolio encompasses a comprehensive spectrum of student work, from translations and grammatical exercises to philosophical reflections and cultural analyses, all while integrating the creative element of ancient artistic inspiration. The assessment of this didactic strategy employs a custom e-rubric, designed to evaluate organisational skills, independent study, engagement with primary sources, artistic integration, and coherent philosophically reflective insights. Feedback garnered from an anonymous student survey indicates that the e-portfolio not only substantiates students’ intellectual growth but also significantly enriches the learning experience, as evidenced by increased student interest and critical inquiry. The results affirm the e-portfolio’s role in fostering a holistic and interactive learning environment that promotes the students’ autonomy and critical thinking. This research contributes to pedagogical discourse by providing a model for applying reflective, project-based learning frameworks to classical studies. This paper is a product of the project Proteus I: Development of Virtual Environments for Experiential Learning in the Humanities.

Before I started teacher training, my default approach to a story in a Latin textbook was to translate it into English. I assumed that this was how you best understood what was happening in the story, and how you showed that you understood. Although I had done other things as a learner myself, including comprehension exercises, my prevailing memory was of translation. Translation is a highly valued and prioritised skill, as seen in the weight given to it in examinations and assessments – though in my school placements I regularly see ‘translations’ that are near-incomprehensible ‘translationese’ rather than fluent English. This means that often after translating a sentence or passage – a very time-consuming activity – you can ask a student, ‘So, what does that mean? What's going on here?’ and that student will struggle to explain. I therefore wanted to investigate other ways to approach Latin stories. I will not claim that we were reading Latin in the truest sense of reading (left to right, at normal speed, comprehending the Latin in Latin and not needing recourse to English), but the three approaches we explored did engage with the texts without requiring literal English translation.

After beginning to teach a year 9 Latin class I noticed a distinct lack of engagement from the majority of the pupils. I decided to use four different adaptive teaching strategies to try to improve engagement from the class. After choosing the four strategies (grouping, questioning, input, and choice) I planned four consecutive lessons around the strategies and modern literature. The study showed that adaptive teaching strategies work best when teachers have good prior knowledge of individual pupils. Without this prior knowledge, I feel the two most successful strategies, grouping and input, would have been significantly less effective. The less effective of the four strategies, questioning and choice, could have been successful with more time and if they were used consistently throughout the teaching year. They both need time in order to develop the way in which they are used by teachers (specifically questioning) and by pupils (both choice and questioning), which is something I will be considering when starting my teaching career.

This article offers small-scale research findings on the impact of narrative contextual clues as a form of scaffolding in Year 9 Latin lessons. The students of this research learned Latin via the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) (CSCP, 1998), which provides teachers and students with meaningful Latin in the form of interconnected stories (Hunt, 2016, 88). As Nuttall has argued, teaching students to read interconnected sentences and appreciate a text's meaning and overall message is what separates the act of reading from parsing vocabulary and grammatical structures (Nuttall, 1996, 2–3). Therefore, while the stories of the CLC can be read as isolated entities, the act of reading requires students to consider the overarching narratives of the stories. Furthermore, as students become confident in their Latin proficiency, it is possible to predict what is going to happen in a story just by thinking about what occurred in the previous line. For example, the first CLC story famously opens with the line Caecilius est in tablino (Caecilius is in the study). We can therefore predict that the story could take place in a Roman house and feature different rooms. Of course, this is exactly what happens in the story. This article focuses on the value of contextual clues in guiding students' predictions and promoting them to read rather than merely parse sentences. Ultimately, I argue that contextual clues, which can easily be overlooked as a form of scaffolding, serve as an invaluable aid for students when reading whole pages of Latin.

This article details how Plautus’ Casina has been used in a general education comparative gender history class over multiple semesters. Since Casina was based on an Athenian New Comedy play (The Lot-Castors by Diphilus), it incorporates elements of late fourth/early third century BCE Athenian ideas on gender, gender roles, and sexuality as well as Republican Roman views on these same areas from approximately a century later. For an introductory comparative gender history course which is designed for a wide time span, this play therefore offers the opportunity to look at two related cultures in just one work. The article highlights areas of the play emphasising those cultures’ ideals and values, and also deals with which areas students have most commented on and which ones are often ignored, in terms of characters, gender roles, and sexualities. The role and representation of slaves in those societies and within the play are also remarked upon.

Achieving proficiency in reading Latin is the stated aim of nearly every Latin course the world over. However, very little research has been devoted to how beginner students attempt to process Latin when it is placed in front of them for the first time. This paper aims to fill this gap, based on a study of students still relatively close to the start of their Latin journeys. I found that they tend to read Latin sentences in their original order, breaking them down into individual lexical items, and trying to discern their meaning by looking for similarities with words they already know. They will usually skip over words they do not recognise, returning to them later. This suggests that, as they become more familiar with Latin vocabulary and grammar, and so long as they are not taught to read in a different order, they will continue to read Latin in the order it is written. There is, however, a perception among many of the students that grammar is difficult, and so they tend to overly rely on context and common sense instead. Going forward, I would try to ensure my students become more confident with their grammar, as context can sometimes lead them astray. However, it is clear that, rather than just giving them tables and lists to learn, they need as much exposure to the grammatical forms ‘in the wild’ as possible, to promote ease of recognition.

This paper describes four methodological proposals for rescuing from oblivion and highlighting women writers in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. In workshops employing a variety of active methodologies, students become acquainted with Greek writers like Sappho, Diotima of Mantinea and Aspasia, and their Roman counterparts, including Sulpicia and Agrippina the Younger, while also becoming aware of the authorship of these women writers and their lack of visibility. The proposals take the shape of activities aimed at fostering a vocation for science among baccalaureate students in Spain but can also be easily adapted to secondary and even higher education in other educational contexts.

The Initial Teacher Training (ITT) Common Core Framework (CCF) requires all teachers to adapt classroom teaching to support all students (Department for Education, 2024). While the Department for Education's previously-encouraged concept of ‘differentiation’ was well-intentioned, in that tasks were meant to be graded to support and develop all students' learning in a class where there were many different levels of prior attainment, it tended to mean that in practice in the classroom different tasks were often set to cater to the supposed different learning attributes of students. Differentiation has now been superseded by the concept of ‘adaptive teaching’. Adaptive teaching is characterised by teaching that takes account of the range in prior attainment of students and anticipates barriers to learning by providing resources or specific support so that they may all achieve the same intended outcomes. Classics teaching is often characterised by the reading of large amounts of text, both in the original languages of Latin or ancient Greek or in translation. Students in the Classics classroom contain a wide range of prior attainment, cultural experiences and may have barriers to learning, such as Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. This article presents findings of how the use of a blended language approach, involving the digital parsing tools in the Cambridge Latin Course and Suburani Latin course books, improved the quantity of translation of Latin achieved by students of mixed prior attainment and encouraged a more effective use of classroom time to develop deeper comprehension and understanding of the translated texts.

This article considers the publication in 1879 of the Moral Philosophy of Aristotle, a book aimed at Oxford University undergraduates studying for the Classics degree course known as Literae Humaniores. This book is of contemporary interest. It takes us to the heart of the question of whether the work of Aristotle is meant for everyone or just for a select few. In principle, whatever we have inherited from Antiquity (whether materially or intellectually) belongs to us all. Therefore, there is an educational requirement to make it accessible to everyone and this should apply to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. But Aristotle is famously obscure and so in practice the study of Aristotle is confined to a small elite. Hatch’s The Moral Philosophy of Aristotle tries to overcome the problem of Aristotle’s obscurity by paraphrasing the Nicomachean Ethics in a popularising fashion and in sharp contrast to the way Aristotle is usually presented. To bring out the distinctive qualities of the Hatch approach this article compares The Moral Philosophy of Aristotle with the translations published in the modern Clarendon Aristotle series, which are intended for a readership made up largely of professionals working in universities. The article contrasts Hatch’s goals of readability and dogmatic clarity with the insistence on semantic fidelity which is the hallmark of the Clarendon series. The article concludes that there is a greater risk of distorting Aristotle’s meaning on the Hatch approach, but that this is compensated for by its pedagogic merits, and suggests that ideally teachers will use both Hatch and Clarendon together.

This article investigates dictionary usage with Year 7 students of Latin. During my lesson observations I noticed how much students relied on looking up words in the dictionary when working on translation from Latin to English. I wanted to find out if there was the potential for a more interactive and/or memorable way for students to work with their dictionaries. This action research project was carried out in an all-boys, secondary, selective school. I noticed that when students were set to work on translation from Latin to English, they spent a significant amount of time looking up words in the dictionary at the back of the booklet. Often by the time they had looked up the word in question and then turned back to the translation, they had already forgotten the meaning of the word they had looked up. Additionally, the words they were looking for were words that they had already encountered several times but forgotten the meaning of since the last time they had looked it up or seen it. The research confirmed that merely copying the words that students looked up down multiple times helped them recall the vocabulary better than if they simply looked the words up.