On Saturday 13th July, ACE Research Fellow Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson spoke at the Team English National Conference held in Peterborough at Jack Hunt School. The conference attracted 450 English teachers from around the UK keen to learn more about innovative approaches to teaching and learning in the English classroom. Arlene’s session was ‘Connecting Classics: Enriching English teaching with help from the Greeks and Romans’. In this session, she showcased Classics activities at KS3, KS4 and KS5 and outlined avenues to funding for teachers in non-fee-paying schools. At KS3, she suggested storytelling using Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. At KS4, she made links between Ovid and Shakespeare. At KS5, she traced the birth of classical rhetoric and stressed its importance for cultivating critically literate citizens in contemporary society.
The feedback from teachers was so positive that three schools have already been in touch to request further information about introducing Classics and Arlene has been invited to speak at two more English teaching conferences in 2020. An unqualified success!
Suggested resources:
- http://classictales.educ.cam.ac.uk
- https://www.bristol.ac.uk/classics/hub/for-schools/the-science-of-stories/
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09g0l2s/clips https://www.rsc.org.uk/news/archive/ovid-the-storyteller
- Teaching-citizenship-article.pdf
- https://www.infoagepub.com/products/Democracy-and-Decency
Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson at the conference
