Volume 14, Issue 1 (Spring 2025)

Patchwork assessment (PA) offers Latin teachers a framework to empower students, retain students from diverse backgrounds, and deeply engage them in ongoing study of Latin languages and literature. PA frameworks vary but must include core elements. All students must produce several assessments, or “patches,” throughout a course to demonstrate their learning; have some level of choice in choosing or constructing their particular patches; submit formative work and regularly receive feedback from instructors and/or peers; reflect on their learning processes throughout, for example in a private journal, or an online discussion board; and generate a formal reflection on their learning journey that “stitches” their learning in the other patches together, creating a personalized learning “quilt”, or “patchwork”. Previous research on PA has indicated that it can be particularly inclusive of a diverse range of students, because it is learner-centered, creates assessment literacy and fosters student autonomy (Hanesworth, Bracken, and Elkington; Gandhi).

Seeking an inclusive model for Latin assessment, the author has designed and taught several Latin courses using patchwork assessment, including one where she ran an ethics-approved study on her students’ evaluation of PA. In this article she first outlines the core elements of PA from the research literature. She then explains the design, execution and results of her first PA Latin course. Third, she presents and analyzes the qualitative and quantitative evidence from the ethics-approved study on her second patchwork Latin course. She assesses the evidence for how patchwork impacted on students’ motivations, learning processes, levels of engagement, and feelings of inclusion in a 2021 Latin course on Catullus. The study data show that PA can offer a rigorous academic framework that centers learners and generates both inclusivity and equity. As such, PA offers an opportunity to those of us in the Latin teaching community who wish to effectively teach students from a wide range of backgrounds with a wide range of abilities. The Appendices present samples of student work, published with permission, and my rubrics, which can be downloaded and used, or adapted, by all.

The main challenge in writing the history of Roman women is their silence, for they either did not themselves write, or what writing they did was not kept and transmitted. Stripped of their own voices, they primarily speak to us through the writings of elite male authors. Thus, the study of Roman women is predominantly a study of representation rather than reality. There are, however, a few welcome exceptions. Despite the increasing interest in bringing to the foreground the voice of Roman female writers, their work still struggles to find space in the male-dominated canon of Latin literature taught at the college level. This paper argues for the necessity of creating a more diverse and inclusive reading curriculum and highlights the benefits of such an approach through the description of a newly designed course on Roman women writers.

This article presents a new way to conceptualize and teach Ancient Greek accentuation in introductory courses and to reintroduce the topic to more advanced learners. The method entirely replaces the traditional approach, which is derived from ancient grammarians’ understanding of how the language’s pitch accent interacted with syllables and does not allow a compact or coherent presentation of how accentuation works. Using the concept of the mora—an abstract linguistic measure of vowel length that is more fundamental to Ancient Greek phonology than syllables when it comes to accentuation—we can reduce most accentuation to four rules that can handle most words in the language but require far less time and effort from students to master. After laying out a rationale for the new system and detailing its four rules, which can be presented in only one or two class sessions, the article discusses how this system applies to the most common morphology and offers pedagogical considerations and suggestions. It then offers additional analyses and discusses ways to approach more advanced topics