Volume 9 Issue 1

With the introduction of the 1997 Standards for Classical Language Learning, Classics instructors from across the country were provided with a consistent set of Standards on which to base their curriculum. Nearly twenty years later, these Standards have undergone major revisions, led by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). In concert with ACTFL’s Standards project, classical associations from across the country have come together and formed a task force to further adapt the ACTFL World Readiness Standards for  Learning Languages and to revise the 1997 Standards for the next generations of students. This paper seeks to accomplish two goals. First, it will delineate the differences between the 1997 Standards and the current version, providing the rationale for why the changes have been made due to shifts in pedagogical thinking and in culture, more broadly. Secondly, it will outline several ways in which the new Standards can have a direct, positive effect on daily classroom instruction. Particular attention will be paid to the new focus on proficiency vs. performance, the increased emphasis on 21st century skills, and the refashioning of the language of the Standards to reflect changes in pedagogical practice.

The revised Standards for Classical Language Learning prompts language teachers to move from a narrow approach that focuses on language alone to a more expansive approach to language learning that highlights the liberal arts and integrative learning. This essay describes how the Standards encourage an integrative approach to language learning, one that emphasizes making connections across diverse disciplines, applying linguistic and cultural knowledge to authentic tasks, recognizing multiple perspectives, and understanding texts and cultural issues contextually. The Standards foster students’ abilities to develop a more deliberative and reflective approach to learning that liberates them from a unidimensional perspective. The essay explores each of the five goal areas of the Standards in light of this integrative and reflective approach: 1) communication is an integrative process that involves three modes of communication; 2) understanding culture relies on making connections; 3) using texts and authentic materials provides opportunities for exploring other disciplines; 4) making comparisons develops critical thinking and intercultural literacy; and 5) communities motivate learners to share their ideas with broader audiences. The essay ends with a sample learning scenario about travel in the ancient world that illustrates an integrative approach to language learning.

Responding to the new Standards for Classical Language Learning, this article emphasizes the importance of material culture to the study of Greek and Latin language and literature at every level, both K-12 and college. Using inscriptions on Greek vases and Roman coins as well as maps and house plans as examples, it demonstrates ways to insert material culture into the Greek and Latin classroom that will enhance a student’s knowledge of the language. It also shows how the use of material culture will help a class meet not only the Cultures goal of the new Standards, but also the Connections, Comparisons, and Communication goals.

The New Standards should be an opportunity to make fresh choices about the introductory practices and exercises for beginning and intermediate Greek. These should emphasize the connections that exist to other areas of a student’s educational experience. Work with transliteration and exercise is one especially good way to make these connections early. Topics and authors beyond the Classical period but with broad recognition (e.g. the Bible, Alexander the Great) and STEM-related readings (Aristotle and Euclid, for example) should become core readings.

The new Standards for Classical Language Learning should be required reading for all college professors. These new Standards will drive classical language instruction for many learners of Latin and Greek. Therefore, to be fully informed about the classics profession one should be informed about the Standards. Those of us involved in teacher-training programs need to become aware of these Standards, for they will influence how our teacher candidate students will be evaluated. In addition, we as college professors have something to learn from these Standards about how we ourselves teach and how we might teach even more successfully. College professors will learn how the 5C’s (Communication, Culture, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities), active Latin (or Greek), Modes of Communication (interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational), Performance (and Scaffolding) vs. Proficiency, and Culture and its Place, all are features of the practice of classical language learning.

The purpose of standards within education is to provide direction for our taught curriculum (content and skills) by identifying desired outcomes. Assessment, the means by which we determine whether or not we have met the standards, ends up being an afterthought in many curriculum discussions; it is a very rare thing indeed that people discuss assessment as a strategy to promote learning and the achievement of desired outcomes in the first stages of curriculum design. Nevertheless, a design approach for curriculum such as Backward Mapping, which begins with the Standards for Classical Language Learning and addresses assessment needs early on, can be very beneficial. Properly done, Backward Mapping is never a case of the “tail wagging the dog,” but rather a holistic approach to design that focuses attention through the Standards towards both the taught curriculum and assessment. In what follows, this article sketches out some basic history and observations about Backward Mapping, describes its basic principles, and discusses some potentials and pitfalls of the process. The central concern of this article, however, is to present two working models of Backward Mapping with the new Standards in order to illustrate this assessment-focused approach to curriculum design.

The publication of the new Standards for Classical Language Learning appears just as the first fruits of the grand digitization project of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana are becoming accessible, along with so many other manuscript digitization projects. The list of available manuscripts comprises a unique repository of instructional tools and potential career opportunities. Free access and the search ability of such a wide range and volume of manuscripts informed by the five goal areas of the new Standards will result in new approaches to information literacy, paleography and textual criticism. Conundrums in manuscripts that a handful of scholars (often working in isolation) in each generation might read and advance are now able to be determined with mechanical certainty, and with a celerity that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. This rediscovery of antiquity in Greek and Latin digitized texts, many from the Renaissance, presents classicists with a thrilling second Renaissance, an opportunity to reinvigorate manuscript study among undergraduates, Latin secondary teachers in training, graduate students, and on-line scholarly communities. My paper is an example of a paleography project that compares digitized manuscripts and applies the new Standards in editing a Medieval Latin text of the hedgehog (Fig. 1) in a thirteenth-century bestiary.

Beginning teachers face many challenges, not least of which is the development of an effective plan for instruction. The revised Standards for Classical Language Learning help beginning instructors situate their language instruction into an effective context, such as is detailed in the Standards’ five goals of Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities. Furthermore, the revised Standards offer numerous meaningful examples of students’ performance abilities at different levels, and flexibility in the design of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. By consulting the revised Standards, beginning teachers can develop more effective and nuanced methods of classical language teaching.

The Standards for Classical Language Learning have great utility and value for those providing instruction and training to Latin teachers. As a faculty member who contributes to the UMass MAT program I have used the Standards as a significant structure within my pedagogical methods courses. The assignments within those courses ask students to examine and apply each Standard individually and, over time, build a curriculum that incorporates all their aspects. This paper describes some of those assignments and provides examples of the creative and pragmatic ways students have applied the Standards. The Standards provide a streamlined and structured field of academic goals that allow teachers in training to understand what will be expected of them in their teaching and that provide teachers a way to defend their Latin programs if such need arises. Faculty at the college level who have students interested in a career in Latin teaching would do well to inform their students of the Standards for Classical Language Learning so that they better understand the standards by which the effectiveness of their future teaching will be judged and assessed.