Rules of Engagement

It is a truism for Eidolon readers to note that the classics, they are a-changin’. I’d even hazard to say many classicists advocate for some kind of change, although we might (and do) disagree on what kind exactly. Our scholarship and outreach work has already changed drastically, and we’re tackling topics and engaging with them in ways that make Classics, if not exactly accessible, at least less distant. This change, however, seems at times slow to trickle into our teaching — at least in the radical, let’s-rethink-our-discipline kind of way.

I’m hardly a radical in the modern sense of the word, but for a while now I’ve been trying to uproot my own pedagogical habits and ground them in (to stretch the simile) more open terrain. Recently, I taught a course on inequality in classical Greece and the modern-day United States that included collaborations with organizations furthering social justice. About half of class time was spent discussing the ancient world, and about half, the modern. The course was built using a framework for community-based learning, called “engaged learning,” a more recent, more thoughtful manifestation of service-learning. The following includes some of the lessons I learned while applying these pedagogical ideals into practice; I also highlight my students’ experiences through direct quotations used with their permission.

White and Fragile?

My very first class teaching about inequality in ancient Greece and modern-day US was a lesson in my own prejudices. I expected a class of woke white liberals with at least some background in Classics — people kind of like me, in other words. Instead, my small class included majors in engineering, business, pre-med, and communications, most of them people of color, and most of them with no particularly strong feelings about social justice one way or another. Trying to hide how flustered I was, I launched into the assigned material for the first day — a video of Robin DiAngelo talking about how difficult it is for “us” white people to talk about race and racism and how blind we are to our underlying racist assumptions. Oh, the irony.

This was hardly an auspicious start, and I hope you learn from my mistake rather than replicate it. In a reflection a couple of weeks later, however, it turned out that my students had learned something, and they shared their stories with a candidness that revealed how much more robust they are than I:

I do believe after watching DiAngelo’s video on race and inequality I understand more as to why I had those instinctive implicit biases. Yes, I do have friends who are black, Indian, and Latino. If someone were to ask me before watching that video if I was racist, my defense would be that I had these types of friends. I was a person who judged the safety of a neighborhood based on the number of white people who lived there by shear instinct. Now, I understand that the way I have grown up with other people has shaped my perspectives. Even though I was raised by a single mom who taught me right from wrong, and who did tell me to treat everyone the same, it was inevitable that I was going to have these universal thoughts about good and bad. White and black.

—Sophomore, pre-med

Dare to Compare

In the weeks that followed, our curriculum was roughly evenly split between ancient Greek and modern-day issues. We discussed abortion in antiquity and reproductive justice in the US. We talked about metics’ rights and how the Flint water crisis shows how neighboring communities are treated differently, fracturing largely along lines of wealth and race. We talked about Aristotle’s justification of slavery and human trafficking as modern slavery.

These kinds of comparisons are not easy, as Eidolon’s Yung In Chae has argued eloquently. There’s the risk of facile comparisons on one hand — “modern slavery is just like ancient slavery” — and the risk of making no meaningful connections on the other. Add to this the possibility of traumatizing or triggering students, and the old “compare and contrast” all of a sudden feels like a holiday yacht headed for Scylla and Charybdis.

I cannot claim expertise or even particular grace in navigating the complex landscape of social (in)justice. One of the most important elements of my course was bringing in visiting speakers who are experts. Representatives from ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and a local juvenile detention program shared their knowledge and challenged the students to think about issues in their own communities. Their focus on facts prevented slapdash conclusions, and a focus on local issues helped combat the temptation to generalize.

Despite my fears, and thanks to the nuanced discussions with the visiting speakers, the students navigated the metaphorical Strait of Messina, seeing both similarities but also differences:

I felt like discussions of slavery in the ancient world helped me to better understand slavery in the modern day. I especially felt like there was a link between the use of abuse to keep slaves from running away in ancient Greece and the use of abuse to keep girls from telling the police about sex trafficking in the modern day. However, I don’t believe that learning more about modern day slavery helped me understand more about the ancient world. I feel like modern day slavery is coming from such a different cultural understanding of slavery and how wrong it is. In ancient Greece, they thought that slavery was natural, whereas today we know that slavery is wrong; yet, people still choose to partake in it.

—Sophomore, Communication Studies

The Uncanny Mirror

While I was worried about putting my foot in it when it came to modern issues, my colleagues seemed most worried about the ancient ones. We can all think of anonymous online personae griping about destroying the rigor of our lofty field with post-modern comparative fluff; my colleagues posed much more reasonable and warranted questions. Would my students develop a shallow understanding of the ancient world? Would they have enough context to interpret the texts they were reading? Would they, ironically enough, in studying multiple marginalized groups not learn enough to do any of them justice?

I will fiercely deny that my students learned less but gladly admit they learned differently. I doubt they could tell you exactly who Demosthenes was, but they wrote thoughtful, factually correct essays on how the different aspects of Neaera’s identity could have influenced her life and experiences as well as others’ perceptions of her. They perhaps couldn’t tell you what empiricism is, but one of the students had this to say about Aristotle:

I feel like learning about slavery in ancient Greece is such a separate topic for me because it feels just like history of something that just “happened” and was a “product of its time.” When I read Aristotle, these are the excuses I personally give him for his views on slavery. However, is this what future generations will say about our huge human trafficking problem nowadays? That we didn’t know better and are simply the product of our times? I certainly hope not, because we do know better and we should be putting more efforts into stopping human trafficking because things being the product of our time is just a terrible excuse for us not being proactive enough as a society to make change.

—Freshman, Business Administration

It is often said that the past can be a useful mirror, or a kind of a training ground for tackling issues that are too daunting to face down in the present. But for my students and myself, the mirror turned into a more uncanny thing, staring right back at us. We sat with the disquiet of wondering if we were treating our own communities with the same distance we did the ancient world; on the other hand, Aristotle’s views gained new sharp edges when studied side-by-side with human trafficking in Detroit suburbs.

Pandora and Play-Doh

The capstone project for the course was a collaboration with an after-school program, with the students organizing activities and teaching about classical Greece to K-8 youth. This is exactly the kind of engaged-learning project that will have some applauding and others rolling their eyes. So, mostly for the latter group: the students expanded their knowledge of Greek mythology, vase painting, domestic archaeology, and ancient games while choosing and designing the activities. They learned how to write a detailed lesson plan and communicate with a non-profit organization in a professional capacity. They became teachers as well as students, making sharp observations about what the youth had learned about the functions of different types of ancient vessels. They made connections with the organization and the youth, some contemplating volunteering with them long-term. The youth, for their part, dove right in, effortlessly imagining their own families within ancient houses, making their own figured vases out of Play-Doh and distinguishing between vessel categories, and asking questions about the myth of Pandora:

The second visit went just as well but the best moment was when I was reading the Pandora’s Box story to the kids. They were finally able to sit calmly and just listen to what I was saying. While I was reading, they seemed so engrossed in what I was saying, and after they really did a great job asking questions about their confusions and I think I did a good job summarizing the story in a way that was easy to understand to such a young audience.

—Freshman, Business Administration

Break the Canon

At the end, the students held up a mirror to me as well. I learned about my own prejudices, both regarding my students and how I envision our field. I learned that my expectations of who takes a Classics course are wrong, or at least largely based on the type of courses we usually offer instead of who might be interested in the ancient world outside of Classics 101.

By centering the margins, they became the canon for the students. Despite all my railing over the years against “teaching the patriarchy,” it was eye-opening to realize just how internalized hierarchies are when I finally tried to flip the script. It’s not that I didn’t want to teach about “marginalized groups,” it’s that, well, to me, they are marginalized. They are foils that throw the standard fare of Aristotle, Sophocles, and symposiastic vessels into relief.

My students were acutely aware that the evidence — and the people — they were studying were unprivileged in many ways, but to them, these data and individuals were central to the narrative of ancient Greece. Their essays on Neaera acknowledged the tension between her agency and the limitations imposed by her shifting position in the social hierarchy, but they centered her instead of the institutions that she navigated. Perhaps ironically, my students’ (to me) radical rethinking of our disciplinary canon largely stemmed from the fact that they had not studied the ancient Mediterranean before, but it opened my eyes to how often the barrier to “changing the narrative” are us instructors instead of the students.

I have questions, not answers. We’ve made some progress, but so many things still haven’t changed. Will we ever achieve change? How?

—Freshman, Business Administration

Some Conclusions

In hindsight, I consider my course a success but not an unqualified one, and not without blunders from my end. Engaged learning has tremendous potential to do good — and harm, especially when taught by someone like me from a place of privilege. Luckily, there are ways to try to minimize the harm and maximize the good. Most of them boil down to training and collaboration.

My course was conceived during a seminar on community-based and engaged learning with a focus on best practices and syllabus development. There is nowadays a wealth of training opportunities revolving around social justice: Intergroup Dialogues and The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program offer training and support with developing and facilitating engaged learning experiences in a responsible manner. Individual universities often also have their own initiatives, although finding these might require searching high and low across different units. There are also many wonderful online resources, from what engaged learning is to how to make your teaching more transparent and democratic, and of course there are collections of syllabi specifically on Classics and marginalized groups.

Teaching my course convinced me that collaboration is a necessity, not a perk or a fun add-on. It saved me and the students from the doubtlessly many more blunders I would have made when tackling topics I was not intimately familiar with. Furthermore, the conversations that impacted my students the most were often had with the visiting speakers or occurred during their visits to the after-school program. Collaboration can also help break away from some of the inherent elitism and power structures baked into the university system that typically dictate that only those with graduate degrees can teach.

Finally, a wish: good pedagogy requires the appreciation of good pedagogy. While universities increasingly have high-level strategies and supporting infrastructure to encourage engaged learning, engaged pedagogy is often done by junior scholars, and often at their own peril as it might make them slower to publish and write conference papers. A wholesale shift in pedagogical practices is unlikely to occur until these new practices are rewarded by departments. My students have no problem breaking down the walls of the Classics classroom; maybe it’s time for us to follow suit.

Elina Salminen is a PhD student in Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Michigan. Her main research interests are the representation of gender and age in burials from northern Greece and domestic space in central and northern Greece.