The Virtue of Variety: Opening the Doors to Wider Pedagogical Practices in UK Schools and Universities

Abstract

The Council of University Classics Departments surveys of 1995 (CUCD, 1995) and 2012 (CUCD, 2012) demonstrated a restricted set of approaches to Latin teaching in UK universities with little evidence of activity outside grammar-translation and graded reading. Despite this, in the 2012 survey, some United Kingdom university tutors made claims for the benefits of experiencing more varied pedagogy, including communicative Latin, in their own previous study and in Summer School Immersion events (Lloyd, 2016a). In schools, a number of challenges continue to provide motivation to move away from current norms of provision (Forrest, 1996; Lister, 2007; Hunt, 2016). Meanwhile, in America, changes in curriculum and methods are being proposed and implemented to meet the challenges of falling enrolment on Latin and other Classics courses.