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Kelly P. Dugan PhD Candidate, Language and Literacy Education University of Georgia: "A Curriculum Enrichment Workshop on the Presentation of Slavery in Latin Textbooks"

Event Type
Other
Sponsor
Department of the Classics
Location
Lucy Ellis Lounge, 1080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana
Date
Dec 9, 2019   12:00 pm  
Cost
Free and open to the public.
Contact
Clara Bosak-Schroeder
E-Mail
cbosak@illinois.edu
Views
45
Originating Calendar
School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics Calendar

Workshop description: In the textbook Reading Classical Latin: A Reasonable Approach, one of the English definitions given for the Latin noun servus is ‘servant’ (Hall 2015, 368). Recent research argues that translations such as this sanitize the violence and involuntary nature of enslavement and promote a false “happy slave” narrative (Dugan 2019; Foreman 2019). An accurate definition would not be ‘servant’ but rather ‘enslaved person.’ In this workshop, I will ask the audience to consider such textbook language choices and discuss why it matters. In the process of evaluating discourses of enslavement, I will guide participants in examining select Latin and English passages. The workshop will include discussion and group work. The goal of this workshop is to equip graduate students and faculty with the basic tools of functional linguistics, a subfield of educational linguistics. Participants will develop lesson plans and brainstorm ways they can apply functional linguistics in their own classroom for the purpose of critically analyzing the presentation of enslavement and other topics. Audience members will also learn what implications the presentation of ancient slavery has on discourses of slavery today, including its relationship with the ongoing racism in American society.

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