American Classical League Institute 2024

In this session, we’ll investigate how an accessible route into the foothills of literature can be created by harnessing the approach students have experienced in their Latin I and II reading courses: selecting engaging passages, which increase relatively gently in linguistic complexity and length, based around themes which are relevant and interesting to today’s students. Suburani Book 3 will be our model, but the approach will be relevant to all teachers at this level. If not always voces populorum, then at least voces diversae, we’ll consider texts from over 30 authors exploring a range of topics: the environment and natural world; managing your image; the projection of love, and hate; the best life; colonization, and the colonized; war and displacement. Together we’ll demonstrate and practice techniques for making literature accessible, from authoring and employing tiered readings to the use of texts as sources to comparisons with later and modern texts.