Now that I’ve working more with design thinking and have learned how powerful of a mindset it can be for creativity and innovation, I’ve been trying to infuse it into my Latin classrooms. It’s not always easy to move through the entire design thinking process in a Latin course, but I believe it can be done—and done well—in at least a few ways. In particular, since language programs are the perfect content areas for “discovery”, I’m using a design thinking approach to do this kind of work with my students (on which I’ve written in more detail here) by building empathy for a society of people who lived in a very different world than ours.
I’ve been exploring using a “gamified” structure in my 7th-grade Latin IA course in the past two years, in which we have a number of thematic “modules” containing both grammatical and cultural content. In each module, we cover the grammar and vocabulary necessary for the course, then do a project around the cultural theme. Our first module focused on ancient geography to give our students a context for their study of the language, and students were asked to build interactive maps to help build an understanding of how geography affected how people lived within the Roman world.
First, we did some research about cities and travel in the ancient world, relying heavily on Stanford’s excellent ORBIS tool (Google Maps for the ancient world). Students worked in pairs to select a city, discover some historical significance about it, learn how far it was from Rome in days, distance, and cost, and figure out how one would have traveled from Rome to that city.
After each group submitted their research into a Google Form, we used it to build one collaborative map for the class in Google’s My Maps (formerly Maps Engine) containing all their data. Because Google can’t locate every ancient city, students had to note the modern country in which the ancient city can be found, before adjusting their location pin. Students then used ORBIS to draw the travel route between Rome and their chosen city. Our Period 9 map looks like:
In complement to our design mindset, we’re in the process of building a “Yes, and…” culture in our classroom that governs how we interact with each other. That’s to say, whenever we’re sharing ideas, we’re very careful to “Yes, and…” each of our classmates’ thoughts, rather than being the “Yeah, but…” type (thanks to +Eric Saibel for directing me to Dave Morris’ brilliant “The Way of Improvisation” TED Talk that shows how valuable saying “yes” can be!).
With that in mind, I then asked our students a few questions through Canvas (our LMS) about travel in the ancient world, using our “Discovery” goals as the driver for the questions. In other words, I encouraged them to consider how travel affected people first and foremost by imagining that they were the ones taking these trips.
- How do you think travel affected communication in the ancient world? What was it like to travel?
- How different is our world today, thanks to the speed with which we can communicate?
- In general, what are the benefits of travel? Does it shape our thinking about people and ideas, and if so, how?
- “I agree with this a lot, I like the way you mentioned how business can expand!”
- “I fully agree, the communication has improved a lot and long distance communications aren’t very difficult. In the ancient world, communicating would take a lot of effort, money, and time.”
- “I think you make very good points in why traveling was a necessity in ancient times and the benefits to travel.”
- “I totally agree with how you mentioned that you can know about world events almost instantly, while hundreds of years ago, you wouldn’t know for months, or maybe more than a year.”