On a chilly February day in 2019, I was grateful for the amazing shelter of the New England Council of Foreign Language Teachers conference. That conference is one of my favorites because it has both a larger and smaller feel, with many different sessions and exhibitors but a smaller attendee group coming from New England and the Mid-Atlantic. My friend Dr. Michael Cave and I had received permission to host a Latin teacher roundtable, a space for us to make connections, socialize, and talk about some of the unique challenges that face us and how we meet them.
Just before this session, I was exploring the exhibit space. At the Cambridge Latin booth, a family friend and Latin-teacher inspiration of mine, Ginny Blasi, introduced me to Samantha Radovich, who was then a Cambridge K–12 education specialist and is now a schools development manager. I invited Samantha to come to our Latin teacher roundtable, and to my pleasant surprise, she showed up!
Challenging topics
The roundtable quickly turned from polite shop talk to an all-out venting session. As Samantha has since observed, while teachers of any language may occasionally encounter challenging topics that impact classroom experiences of and discussions about diversity, equity, and inclusion—like misogyny, war, classism, and enslavement—Latin teachers often confront multiple such topics in each class session. This reflects both the Roman society and the teaching texts most readily available to us. In the roundtable that day, we discussed some of the challenges of our specific textbooks and of the curricula for standardized tests like the AP and the IB.
Samantha did something remarkable during all that talk. She listened. In that environment, it would have been so easy to be defensive or to dismiss our concerns as just the way things are for Latin teachers. Instead, she heard our frustrations and decided to do something about them.
Not long after, Samantha reached out about the first series on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in the Latin Classroom, an initiative then under development by Cambridge’s US team. The image that came to mind as I thought about starting this work was that of the diver on the Etruscan tomb. Prior to this, I had dipped my toes into issues of social justice in the Latin classroom, but I had not taken the leap of a deep dive. Just like the diver, I knew that once I took the plunge, my teaching and learning practice would never be the same.
Many of the issues taken up by the series were those Samantha and I had talked about, like our classrooms’ needs for curricular representation of women, support for neurodiverse students, and safe spaces to discuss challenging topics.
The series made room to explore all these topics and more, and I personally feel so fortunate to have worked with this incredible program and its amazing contributors. I appreciated that, while Cambridge sponsored the program, the series itself was textbook-neutral and featured teachers from diverse backgrounds, teaching experiences, and geographic locations. I learned so much in researching my presentations, and I learned even more from the other presenters and interviewees.
Samantha and I have continued collaborating on the DEI-related issues facing both Latin and other language teachers, and I hope to continue my deep dive into this work. I also started teaching a course, called “Social Justice in the Latin Curriculum” and offered through Idioma Education and Consulting, that supports teachers in infusing their curricula with DEI-related content and conversations.
One of the greatest obstacles to creating more diverse, equitable, and inclusive Latin classes is that Latin teachers do not have access to resources and texts by and about women and other historically marginalized people. In order to meet this need for curricular representation, and inspired by my work in Cambridge’s DEI series, I am creating a website called Teaching Outside the Canon.
It will gather free, teacher-created resources, like texts, inscriptions, gravestones, and graffiti by and about women and other historically marginalized people. I have thought about doing this for many years, but I would not have taken the first steps to implement it without the support of Samantha and this whole program. As our series now comes to an end, I am so grateful that everything we have learned in these three years’ worth of presentations will remain accessible to current and future Latin teachers. Ave atque vale.
About the author
Maureen Lamb is the Latin Teacher and Dean of Academic Technology and Innovative Pedagogy
at the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, CT. She also works as a Google Certified Trainer and education
consultant, and she teaches graduate courses in Language and Latin pedagogy and instructional technology
for Idioma Education and Consulting. She has been recognized for her work as the CT Language Teacher of
the Year, NECTFL Mead Fellow, CANE Weincke Award, and the ACL Elizabeth Watkins Award. She is
dedicated to creating an inclusive classroom environment, to using technology to enhance the student
experience, and to making Classics comprehensible.
