Teaching Difficult Stories: Trauma-Informed Teaching in the Classics Classroom

Abstract

Every textbook has its strengths, and each its own quirks and idiosyncrasies. Apart from any pedagogical concerns about the old Cambridge Latin Course textbook series, for example, was the question of how it represented problematic aspects of the ancient world, such as the role of women and the institution of slavery (see Hunt, 2016). The de Romanis Latin course (Radice et al., 2020a and 2020b), which we use at my school at Key Stage 3, takes a much more detached approach to the teaching of Roman culture, presenting its reading exercises as individual stories grouped around each chapter's centralised theme rather than as a narrative told from the perspective of one group of fictionalised characters. But difficult subjects still arise and need to be handled sensitively by the teacher – particularly given the age group (11–14) the textbook is aimed at. This paper shows one way in which this might be achieved.