By Darcy Tuttle, Ancient History & Mediterranean Archaeology
Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024
Before taking their first college history course, many first-year students have limited experience engaging with primary sources and lack confidence critically evaluating secondary sources written by experts. For my R1B course, “Conversations with the Dead in Ancient Rome,” I aimed for students to not just learn history, but be historians and emerge with the skills necessarily to create a dialogue between primary and secondary sources.
Early in the semester, I balanced the reading-based homework evenly between primary and secondary sources (e.g., one week’s homework involved reading a set of epitaphs from a Republican era family tomb alongside a chapter from a modern book discussing the period). I discovered, however, that students tended to approach the inscriptions primarily in alignment with the arguments advanced in the secondary source. They were, understandably, inclined to defer to the arguments advanced by a senior scholar.
To build student confidence in applying the same critical eye to both ancient texts and modern scholarship, I restructured the homework in the second half of the semester. For most classes, I only assigned secondary sources as reading homework. I then provided relevant primary sources via short handouts in class. After reading and annotating the handouts, the students did an in-class writing or a small group activity focused on to what extent the scholarly arguments we had read for homework explained the features of these primary sources.
For instance, in preparation for a class on Roman gladiators, students read an article that outlined trends in the funerary commemoration of gladiators in the Italian peninsula. In class, I showed students a set of epitaphs from a gladiator cemetery in a Dalmatia. I then had students write a paragraph or two discussing how these epitaphs aligned with or departed from the trends we had read about for homework. Students noticed commonalities between the Italian and Dalmatian materials, but also picked up on features that might be specific to the cemetery in Dalmatia. This activity modelled how students could use scholarly articles about one set of primary source materials to interpret a different set, a skill that many of them executed extremely well in subsequent writing.
Before another class, students read an article that discussed the appropriate translation of a particular Latin adjective common in funerary texts. In class, I gave students a set of epitaphs using this term. The students discussed them in small groups and worked toward their own definition of the word. This activity provoked a discussion about how there is often no one right way to interpret a primary source. It encouraged students to be willing to suggest a reading that might nuance or even disagree with an existing scholarly interpretation. In their final research papers, I was pleased to see students similarly tackling ancient texts and their associated scholarship while formulating their own distinct theses.
Ultimately, I evaluated the success of these exercises based on the class’s final papers, which overall successfully applied the skills we practiced in class. But I was not the only one who found these activities productive—I was thrilled to see that many students evidently felt the same, with several highlighting the in-class activities as particularly effective aspects of the course in terms of improving their writing.