Impact case study database

The impact of Dickey’s research in the education sector in the UK, Europe and the USA has been realised through the development of Learning Latin the Ancient Way, which has received considerable critical acclaim and is hugely popular for its clear and accessible explanation of complex research (E1) While developing the book, Dickey experimented with creating a physically immersive experience of an ancient schoolroom which was trialled during the 2014 Being Human Festival. The success of this trial has led on to wide-ranging engagement with students and educators across the UK, Europe and USA that is changing the way Latin is taught.

1. Educational and cultural impact on school pupils, teachers and home educators

Dickey’s reconstruction of an ancient school for Reading – the “ Reading Ancient Schoolroom” – offers local children the chance to experience ancient education for themselves (E2). Volunteers come from as far away as the Netherlands and they leave with the ability to replicate the event at their own institutions. The concept was developed in collaboration with schoolteachers, home educators (predominantly parents of school-aged children), and the co-ordinator of a home-schooling network, to design and execute an event that is highly educational and at the same time attractive both to children and to schools. Dickey worked with colleagues at the Institute of Education at the University of Reading to develop the Schoolroom into a larger activity; since 2014 the Schoolroom has run five times, for a total of 19 days, engaging with 16 schools from Reading (three of which are widening participation schools) and as far away as London and Dorset; average daily attendance was between 20 and 60. These events have involved approximately 30 teachers and 470 schoolchildren (aged 5 to 18), c.240 people who took part independently (children and parents, including home educators and home educated children), as well as approximately 30 children from the Reading Young Archaeologists Club (E3). On the whole, counting the c.50 volunteers who helped run the events over the years, nearly 800 people have interacted with the Ancient Schoolroom. Dickey’s article ‘An Immersion Class in Ancient Education’ ( Journal of Classics Teaching 16, 2015: 38-40) further disseminated the benefits of this approach.

The Schoolroom has been primarily held on the University’s campus, but in June 2016 a mobile version was trialled with great success at Reddam House School (Berkshire). This involved extensive collaboration with Reddam House teachers and with other academics who delivered additional events (E3).

Direct engagement with the Schoolroom has had a pedagogical impact on education practitioners, teachers and home-school educators and a cultural impact on schoolchildren and volunteers. Teachers who have participated in the Schoolroom confirm it has had an effect on their teaching practice, making them reconsider how they approach children with different educational needs (E3-5). Teachers have learnt new and different methods to use in their own teaching as well as being empowered to teach an often-challenging subject for children to relate to (E3-5). Home educators confirm that this teaching style has validated their approach to teaching, especially if their reason for home schooling is for neurodiversity or disability reasons. For one in particular, it enabled a child with selective mutism to talk in a classroom setting for the first time (E3-5).

Children participating in the Schoolroom started the activity with no previous understanding of ancient behaviours and the similarities and differences compared with behaviours today. The immersive experience had an immediate impact on participants and changed their attitude towards learning about “ancient things”. Children expressed their enthusiasm for learning “about the Romans first-hand” and experiencing for themselves how an ancient schoolroom would have worked. The Schoolroom provided them with a “hands-on” appreciation of the way children used to learn and a greater appreciation of the advances that have been made in their education: “it really brought to life everything that we had previously read about Roman schooling and helped us to appreciate just how tough those memorisation exercises were and how difficult it is to actually write on a wax tablet” (E3, E5).

1. Training and workshops for teachers, home-educators and students

Dickey’s research is being used to train the next generation of Classics teachers on the PGCE Classics programme at the University of Cambridge. The course now incorporates Dickey’s methods in two sessions: the first is about the history and range of Latin courses in which trainee teachers compare a wide range of Latin textbooks; and the second is about the history of teaching Latin, which incorporates extracts from the Colloquia (output 1) to understand how an ancient classroom may have operated. Dickey’s research was incorporated into the curriculum for PGCE Classics teacher-training at Cambridge in 2015/16 and was taught to 15-20 trainee teachers. The methods have since been learnt by a further 75-100 trainee teachers (E6).

Dickey’s workshops on ancient schooling and language learning have enabled teachers, students, and Classicists around the world to reconstruct ancient educational settings for themselves. These workshops have been delivered in Harvard, Baltimore, Lausanne (in French), Leiden (in Dutch), and a variety of sites in the UK; on each occasion participants leave with a set of materials that they can use in their own teaching. In Lausanne the workshop participants were exclusively schoolteachers and trainee teachers (more than 30 individuals from all over the Francophone area of Switzerland) (E7).

Dickey’s Ancient Schoolroom has inspired similar immersive learning experiences across the UK and Europe. For example, since 2016, ten student volunteers from Durham 6^th Form Centre have been running an immersive schoolroom and temple experience for over 100 local primary schoolchildren on an annual basis (E8); and in 2017-18, a replica ancient schoolroom activity was run in San Tomé in Spain (E9).

Dickey’s research has made learning Latin immersive and accessible, which is enabling a new generation of teachers and pupils to engage with these texts. The Ancient Schoolroom and the associated training workshops have allowed for this model of immersive learning to be used across the UK, Europe and the USA to reinvigorate the teaching and learning of ancient languages while enabling participants to have a clearer and tangible understanding of how ancient schooling worked.