While observing A-level students at my PP2 school, I noticed that their responses to classical texts largely consisted of the identification of stylistic tropes. The students could identify a text's stylistic features but they struggled to articulate and develop their own personal reactions to the text. They had been well-trained in this sort of ‘feature-spotting’ and therefore their reading experience was narrowly mechanical rather than genuinely exploratory. Every passage they encountered was put through the same analytical process with the unsurprising result that every classical author ended up sounding much the same. This seemed to me to be fundamentally passive way of engaging with literature. I was struck by Muir's contention that ‘the pupil should not be a passive recipient in the study of literature’ (!974, p.515). Hence, I wanted to devise a teaching strategy that would enable my students to be more active in the formulation of a personal response to the text.

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Reader response and the classical pedagogy. Teaching the Odyssey.

Using classical reception to develop students’ engagement with classical literature in translation

Creative writing is a teaching strategy employed increasingly less frequently as students progress through their secondary education. From my own school experience and observing other teachers, many such tasks are set in Year 7 but then later give way to the pressure of preparing students for exams. In the first Professional Placement of my postgraduate teacher training, I observed a Classical Civilisation teacher set her sixth form students to write a poem about Hector or Andromache from the Iliad Book 6. Although there was some initial reluctance, students largely engaged with the task and we were both impressed by the results. This prompted me to carry out my own research project to explore further the potential impact of creative writing, following the argument that one way into a text is to understand the characters within it.

Gaining understanding of different perspectives in Virgil's Aeneid through creative writing: an action research project with a sixth form Classical Civilisation class in a mixed comprehensive

Reader response and the classical pedagogy. Teaching the Odyssey.

Citations

Using classical reception to develop students’ engagement with classical literature in translation

Gaining understanding of different perspectives in Virgil's Aeneid through creative writing: an action research project with a sixth form Classical Civilisation class in a mixed comprehensive

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