The department has received a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to fund Nadin Marsovszki to work for a year expanding the Reading Ancient Schoolroom. The ancient schoolroom (www.readingancientschoolroom.com) is a re-enactment of a school from Roman Egypt in AD 301; Reading students and volunteers from a wide area teach local schoolchildren some of the literacy, mathematical, and linguistic skills that ancient children would have learned at school, using the original technologies (wax tablets, papyrus rolls, reed pens, inkwells, counting boards) and authentic exercises, while dressed as Romans, in a room with views of the Nile.
Nadin teaching in the ancient schoolroom in 2017 (Photo: Alex Wickenden)
For the past eight years the ancient schoolroom has been a rare event, normally held on campus just a few days each year. Although there is often demand for more of it (both children and volunteers not only learn a lot but also find it great fun), expansion has not really been practical because of the time constraints of its director, Professor Eleanor Dickey. Eleanor did much of the research underpinning the ancient schoolroom and originally started the event as a way to share that research with the public, but the pressures of her ongoing research and teaching limit the time she can spend on this activity. There is also a limit to the amount of time for which Edith Morley G40 can be taken away from the undergraduate students whose study space it normally is.
These restrictions will be lifted by the AHRC award, which will allow Nadin to take over running the schoolroom and bring it to schools instead of expecting them to travel to the university campus. Nadin is the ideal person to undertake this role and is a Reading Classics success story. A Hungarian by birth, she arrived at Reading in 2016 to start an undergraduate degree in Museum and Classical Studies. In her first term she took the ‘Texts, Readers and Writers’ module and met Eleanor, who immediately spotted her potential. Although Nadin started her course with limited English that initially prevented her from doing really well academically, she was obviously enthusiastic, hard-working and intelligent. With support and mentoring from various members of the department (not only Eleanor but also Amy Smith and Peter Kruschwitz), she rapidly blossomed into an academic star, eventually gaining a Distinction in the MA in Classics. She started teaching in the ancient schoolroom in 2017 and has continued to be involved ever since, as literature teacher, pottery teacher, maths teacher, and most recently Latin teacher.
Nadin’s strengths extend outside the university: while doing her MA she worked as a teacher at a school specialising in children with special educational needs. The teaching experience she gained in this role will be of great use to her in running the ancient schoolroom. But perhaps even more important is the passion she acquired for improving the experience and attainment that autistic children have in school, which led her to focus her MA dissertation on the potential usefulness of ancient educational techniques for autistic pupils today. So in addition to expanding the ancient schoolroom as a resource for all children, Nadin will be using the findings of her dissertation to produce adapted versions of it for autistic pupils.
Following on from the spotlight talks, the panel moved onto considering the teaching and learning experience of Classics in relation to inclusivity, both at undergraduate level and in the context of secondary education. Participants were wowed by the eloquence of two school students (from Runshaw College in Lancashire and Pimlico Academy in London), who spoke about the perception of Classics as the subject of the privileged elite, with limited real-world application. Equally interesting was the insight from teachers from the same schools, who explained how they are reforming traditional approaches to Classics, such as by deemphasising the importance of masters and slaves and examining issues of gender in the ancient world.
Thank you so much for this – it’s great for us to be back for a little while, albeit virtually. All three of us share the same passion: our enthusiasm for Roman inscriptions, especially inscriptions composed in verse. To us, those inscriptions are not just stones or pieces of metal that happen to have some poetry inscribed on them. They are carriers of art. They are visible, tangible manifestations of a universal artistic practice of Roman times, spanning the empire across time and space, with thousands of examples surviving to the present day.
We wanted to make a number of strong, important points. About the way in which we perceive, in which we encounter the Roman world. About the way the ancient world is presented to us in museums, archives, exhibitions, and books. And we want to do so while racing a wide audience because what we have to say and offer is relevant to so many different audiences.
We want to enthuse new generations with our passion for Roman history, for poetry, for epigraphy. We want to give teachers the opportunity to expand the canon of teaching through the inclusion of poetry that students can easily relate to. We want to invite museums, collections, and policymakers to rethink their approach to the way in which these incredibly exciting, talking objects from the ancient world are displayed. What better way to achieve this than to choose a text that expresses, in such beautiful words, the grief of pet owners – whose faithful companion had died. We feel we all can relate to that, and we feel that this text alone opens up so many new ways of thinking about the Roman world and the people who “were” the Romans, than the ever-same repertoire of classical authors.
Haha, oh dear! Well… none of us are natural-born entertainers. We all were terrified and at first, we hated to see our faces and hear our recorded voices. But 
We hope that putting this video out there will make it available for generations to come – for pupils, teachers, academics, cultural managers, policy makers: it should entertain and be useful at the same time! It’s genuinely a piece of art.
