Six Foreign Classicists:[1] Teaching Challenges and Successful Strategies

The steady influx of international faculty into American universities, despite the (federally mandated) extra hiring-cost,[2] now makes foreign professors a visible minority on many campuses and, consequently, in classics departments across the country. Foreign professors now receive critical attention: we frequently hear about their academic lives, their contributions to global perspectives,[3] their unfamiliarity with American educational practices,[4] their often low student evaluations on the basis of their perfectly intelligible, but still alien, accents,[5] and, most recently, their post-9/11 immigration difficulties.[6] This panel focuses on the classroom challenges that face classicists who are not native speakers of English, and the various strategies that they use effectively to overcome, and even benefit from, such challenges.

The first speaker, an Italian national, discusses how she uses her background and ‘exotic’ accent to create a positive classroom environment for the teaching of art history and, particularly, classical art. Turning the tables on the students and asking them to pronounce Italian words, or English words with an Italian accent, she highlights the relative unimportance of the language barrier and instead turns it into an element that enriches the students’ learning experience. Additionally, she draws on personal experiences and resources to demonstrate the powerful impact of the classical past on the Renaissance and on modern Italian life, thus making Roman art literally come alive in the classroom.

The second speaker, a Modern Greek national, discusses the particular challenges involved in teaching the ancient version of one’s own mother tongue. He faces the dilemma of making Beginning Greek accessible and attractive enough to retain students at the intermediate level while maintaining the standards he was taught in Greece, where students routinely translate Plato, Sophocles, and Thucydides in high school. Paralleling the students’ struggle with Greek to his own struggle with English, this instructor demonstrates by example the benefits and joys of foreign language acquisition. In addition, he makes hard choices of omitting those minutiae of grammar which he, as a Modern Greek, understands intuitively, but which can become daunting to the students and deter them from continuing into Intermediate Greek.

The third speaker, again a Modern Greek national, discusses the challenges involved in teaching Beginning Latin. From students’ initial surprise that she teaches Latin rather than Greek to their questions about whether her pronunciation of Latin is ‘correct,’ this instructor constantly triangulates three languages in the classroom: Latin, English, and Modern Greek. While she too parallels her own acquisition of English to the students’ acquisition of Latin, the playing ground here is more level, since she cannot claim the cultural ownership or inside knowledge of Latin. Additionally, by expanding on the ‘Culture’ section of the textbook, this teacher draws connections between Greek and Roman culture, their modern equivalents, and the social attitudes of Mediterranean people which sometimes ring quite ‘ancient’ to young American undergraduates.

The fourth speaker, a Bulgarian national, highlights the power of humor and sincerity as the greatest weapons of the foreign classicist. Taking a direct approach on the very first day of class, she begins by announcing all the potential difficulties and misapprehensions that the students may encounter as two languages and cultures interact in the classroom. Drawing from personal anecdotes, this speaker explains how, on many occasions, she turned a miscommunication with students into an opportunity to break the ice and establish an informal, positive learning atmosphere. In addition, this teacher’s experience with high school teaching in her home country informs her teaching by revealing unexpected similarities between these very different student groups.

Finally, a fifth speaker, a Chinese national, will summarize and respond to our papers by adding her own unique perspective. Being the only non-European classicist in the group, she will build upon some of these ideas as they relate to the perspectives of Asian classicists and to the possibility of a non-Eurocentric approach to classics.

The organizer of this panel has invited Dr. Gonda Van Steen to preside over the panel, and she has kindly and generously accepted our invitation. Dr. Van Steen, a Dutch national, is an eminent Hellenist and a great philellene, with a deep knowledge of Roman literature. Her probing questions to the panelists and her skillful manner of steering our discussion will prove that Dr. Van Steen is as integral to our panel as the speakers themselves. She teaches at the University of Arizona, and thus will be, quite literally, hosting our group. It is my sincere hope that the program committee will allow the six foreign classicists to share our teaching challenges and successful strategies with our colleagues.