2010 Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation Published by APA/ACL

[Andrew Reinhard]

The American Philological Association (APA) and the American Classical League (ACL) jointly created and published the Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation in 2010. There is a small section listing sample online resources (eClassics is one of the three resources listed!). There is also a "Note on Technology" on page 17. From the Foreword:

"Teaching Latin is a noble calling but not an easy vocation to follow. Someone who wants to be a Latin teacher has many ways to reach that goal, from on-the-job apprenticeship to formal programs in teacher education. No matter what their route to the classroom, prospective Latin teachers must study one and perhaps two difficult classical languages, and they must acquire the pedagogical knowledge and skills necessary for successful practice. In colleges and universities prospective Latin teachers, never very numerous, are sometimes shoehorned into programs designed for teachers of modern languages or other subjects. Eager students who sense a calling to teach Latin may find themselves turned away by misinformed educators who believe that there is no need for such
teachers or who have little notion of how to prepare them. Often the greatest challenge, both for teachers and for those who train them, is to know what knowledge matters and what skills are essential. This document has been created to help them meet that challenge."

Please follow the link above to read the rest of the 24-page document. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on these standards and if you think there should be more mention of technological literacy integrated into it.

Andrew Reinhard (eClassics)

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Andrew, thanks for sharing this. There was nothing in it very surprising, and since it doesn't really specify levels of competence, but just vaguely defined areas of competence, I don't imagine it will really make any difference in any undergraduate program.

In particular, the report really doesn't grapple with the issue of what Latin fluency means - it doesn't envision actual conversational Latin, for example, and it really shies away from the issue of Latin composition in that it seems to expect that teachers compose Latin on a sentence-by-sentence level, illustrating grammatical points, with no notion that one would choose to write in Latin as a form of communication or for self-expression. To me, that is a real danger: to the extent that Latin cannot even begin to approximate the kind of fluency that teachers and students acquire in living languages, Latin runs a real risk of (justifiably) being removed from language programs and replaced with languages that really are being taught as languages, with a full range of fluency expected in the teachers and students.

Did you see anything in here that was not just the "same old, same old"...? Maybe I missed something... They say at one point that Latin teacher preparation in 2010 is not what it was in 1960 - but how so? Except for the acknowledgment that there are some online resources of value (eclassics gets a nod for example!), I didn't see anything in here that would be different from what Latin would have looked like in 1960. It certainly doesn't describe anything at all different from the training I got as a Classics major in the 1980s. Maybe somebody will be able to show how this report will make a difference to someone, somewhere... I will be curious what others say about it.