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.

The Department for Education (DfE) GCSE Subject Content for Ancient Languages embeds the study of literature as a significant requirement in the specifications of any Latin GCSE (DfE, 2018). Specifications are instructed to ‘require students to read a range of ancient literature, including at least one selection of prose and/or verse texts in the original language, adapted and abridged, as appropriate’ (DfE, 2018, p5). Furthermore, students are to be expected to respond to the literary style; show an understanding of the cultural and historical context; and compare and contrast ‘values and social practices from the ancient and modern worlds’ (DfE, 2018, p5). The two exam boards offering GCSE Latin, Oxford Cambridge and RSA (OCR) and Eduqas, take slightly different approaches to fulfilling these requirements. Both have a range of module options to choose from; however, OCR offers fewer choices of author in the original language (OCR, 2015), whereas Eduqas requires either six or ten different authors in its compulsory literature module (Eduqas, 2015).

Part way through the second school placement of my PGCE teacher training course I began to teach Latin unseen translation, where students are given an unfamiliar passage to translate, to a Year 13 cohort of just two students. The translation element of the course was proving challenging for both students – they struggled with language comprehension, and the A Level language course seems not very accessible to students with low prior attainment. Furthermore, my second placement school is an Upper School, so students start Latin from scratch in Year 9. Because of the time constraint those who choose take GCSE do the Eduqas Latin exam, which requires that slightly less grammar and syntax needs to be covered than the OCR syllabus (for example, the ablative absolute construction is absent from the Eduqas examination, but present in the OCR). For the small number carrying on in the 6th form, this results in a linguistic shortfall which has to be made up before beginning the OCR A Level specification. This seems to be a challenge even for very able Latinists, and more so for my two students, Alice and Michael (not their real names), and had presented an added barrier to their facility in grasping and translating complex language structures, both in unseen translations and the demanding set texts. Simply ‘practising’ by going through texts together was not proving helpful, as once my oral prompts during this process were removed and they were left on their own they reverted to guesswork instead of applying their knowledge and logic to the text. Similarly poor results in translation were evident from practice literature papers which they had taken before February half term, even though these were prepared texts – while the language paper asks students to tackle short unseen translations, the literature component calls for the extensive preparation of a much longer text, from which students must translate and analyse selected passages in the examination, as well as answering a broad essay question. However, despite the fact that Alice and Michael had been through their set text in detail with their teacher and made their own translations, it appeared that, when presented with a passage from the set text in exam conditions, the language looked just as intimidating to them as if they had not seen it before, and they were equally unable to produce a sensible attempt at translation. I therefore became interested in finding ways for them to approach texts which would minimise the ‘fear factor’ and allow them to access meaning without being put off by complex syntax.

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.

Within this article I aim to explore how greater student dialogue in the classroom can drive engagement with ancient drama. As part of the Classical Civilisation A Level specification, students need to demonstrate knowledge and awareness in the examination of how Aristophanes’ Frogs might have been performed on stage and its possible reception by a classical audience. This research investigates how teachers can effectively encourage student discourse in the classroom for students to engage with and analyse Frogs as a piece of comic drama, rather than simply as an A Level set text.

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.

This action research project investigates the effects of the use of ‘free composition’ in the teaching of Latin to a group of Year 10 pupils. By ‘free composition’ I mean pupils were not given English sentences to translate into Latin, as is the case in many Latin course books (see, for example, Cullen and Taylor's Latin to GCSE (2016)), but were told to use simple Latin sentences to tell a story of their own devising. The focus of the study will be on analysing pupils’ perceptions of the value of free prose composition and how free prose composition can be used to analyse pupils’ understanding of grammatical features by investigating the types of errors which they made.

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.

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. Μy 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.

Trainees were encouraged to tell a mythological story to the class, lasting about ten minutes. They could use props and other visual aids if they wished, but the emphasis was for them to practise speaking before the class, using prompt cards if necessary, and employing all the techniques of a professional oral ‘poet’ – such as gesture, eye contact, tone of voice and so on. There is obviously considerable general interest among younger students about mythology. Locally, interest is captured by the Cambridge School Classics project which puts on an annual Ovid Mythology competition and the website War with Troy is used by several of the schools where trainees are placed. Its use as a stimulus for learning has been well-documented by its author and past PGCE subject lecturer Bob Lister (2005, 2007) and by Walker (2018), a former teacher trainee from the faculty. Some of the Latin textbooks such as Minimus (Bell, 1999) and Suburani (Hands-Up Education, 2020) contain myth episodes and are familiar to the teacher trainees. The GCSE and A Level qualifications often contain mythological subject matter. Khan-Evans (2018) has shown how older students of Classics have retained deep-rooted affection for mythological stories in their earlier schooldays. Research into the power of mythological storytelling as a stimulus for learning, creative arts and even therapy is current, as the Our Mythical Childhood project (2020) has demonstrated. A book of the project's work is eagerly anticipated next year. The recent Troy exhibition at the British Museum has also awoken considerable interest.

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).

This piece originated as an article in In Medias Res on 31 May 2019 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.

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.

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.

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.

This article explores a model of teaching Latin at several state-funded secondary schools within the same geographical location. This model could work for Latin teachers who wish to reintroduce Latin to parts of the country where there are few ready-made jobs in Classics teaching. It will work best in an area where there are a number of secondary schools within easy travelling distance of one another.