From Foreigners to Citizens: Conceptualising Students’ Entry Into Disciplinary Communities of Practice

Abstract

The discipline of Classics, like most other disciplines in Higher Education contexts, faces numerous challenges related to changed national and international expectations. This article argues that in order to meet these challenges the discipline needs to reflect on its activities and teaching practices in a structured and deliberate way. Such reflection can be facilitated by theoretical frameworks designed in education research. We present one such framework, the "Communities of practice" as designed by Wenger (1998) and show how the framework can be employed, at a theoretical level, to conceptualise the challenges facing the discipline as well as to enhance teaching practices in an undergraduate Greek class, through an institutionally supported project. By applying this framework educators can assist students both in preparing for their careers as well as in engaging with their studies. IntroductionThe status of Classics in higher education elicits a diverse array of opinions. These range from views that Classics are under threat as a discipline (Culham & Edmunds 1989) or that Classics are in need of radical change in order to survive as a "viable subject" (Demos 1995:321) to more positive expositions of the discipline's state of affairs. The latter are embodied in the arguments of Galinsky, who holds that there are "various roads to classical salvation" (1991:449). By responding to Culham and Edmunds (1989), Galinsky (1991) not only shows how the discipline is continuously discovering its own strengths to meet these challenges but also argues that Classics should be looking ahead in order to keep on meeting these challenges. Yet despite his optimistic assessment, Galinsky does not deny that there are Herculean challenges facing Classics as a discipline in Higher Education contexts (1991:442). These concerns, although related, can be separated into two broad categories, namely teaching and learning concerns and contextual concerns. The former refers to questions such as those posed by Kitchell et al (1996:393). They state that questions such as "Why do so few students take Greek today?" and "Why, once we get students, is the retention rate so low?" are common concerns. These teaching and learning concerns should not be considered a recent development. Consider the following claim:If we judge by the results obtained, we are not teaching the students to translate the New Testament, to say nothing about appreciating the Greek. We are not training future Greek scholars nor fitting men to use the Greek New Testament in their own studies.While this probably resonates with practitioners today it is in fact a claim Pottle (1937) made over 70 years ago. The second kind of concern relates more to what

Higher Education for the Public Good: Views from the South

“…André, from the Centre for Teaching and Learning, collaborated with Lauretta from Classical Studies to reorientate the first-year module according to a community of enquiry approach. This permitted more experienced professors to share their wisdom with the first-year students (Young and Kotze, 2009).…”