Aristophanes’ Peace: A Topical Story by Giovanna Di Martino

After thirteen long years of war, Athens and Sparta have turned a proxy dispute into an all-out extravaganza of chaos. The goddess Peace has been locked away in a cavern, far, far away, tired, sad, and downright cross with everyone for ignoring her.

Meanwhile, the gods have taken a permanent vacation from their heavenly palace, seeking refuge in the most remote corner of the earth, leaving the god of War to run the show. The result? A nation exhausted, angry, and simply desperate for any sort of deal to end the madness.

Enter Trygaeus: a once-successful winemaker who decides to take on the epic task of saving Greece. With a giant beetle as his trusty steed, he’s determined to fly to heaven, convince the gods to convince humans to cut the nonsense, and rescue Peace.

Originally produced in the spring of 421 BCE in Athens at probably the largest theatre festival in the ancient world, the City Dionysia – just days before a much-anticipated peace treaty was finally signed between Athens and Sparta – Peace is the work of the visionary playwright Aristophanes: it stands as a powerful symbol of hope and the promise of an end to stubbornly useless suffering.

This was the imaginative story that we decided to work on for our project Aristophanes at Chickenshed, an international collaboration between the University of Bristol, University College London (UCL), the University of Parma, Chickenshed Theatre and Teatro delle Albe.

Aristophanes at Chickenshed: Aims, Motives and Methods

The project comprised a five-day workshop on Aristophanes’ Peace held from the 28^th of October to the 1^st of November 2024 at Chickenshed Theatre in London. This was directed by Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari of Teatro delle Albe, with the assistance of dramaturg Giovanna Di Martino (UCL), who also produced a new translation of the play. This project brought together students from the universities involved with students from the Chickenshed’s education programmes, culminating in two (sold-out) performances of a new version of Peace.

This workshop is rooted in the pedagogical imperative of integrating performance practice into the study and teaching of ancient Greek drama. As well as providing a more accessible approach to ancient Greek dramatic scripts, this approach also serves as an appropriate method for exploring these texts that, before enjoying a long and successful literary life off the stage, were originally intended for performance.

Ancient Greek Drama, in and outside the Classroom

Since the 1960s, ancient Greek drama has remained one of the most widely used sources for writing new plays and for directors to experiment on a global scale (Hall 2004: 12). This year, the London stage alone has seen Robert Icke’s widely acclaimed Oedipus at the Wyndham Theatre and Alexander Zeldin’s equally successful The Other Place (a rewrite of Antigone) at the National Theatre; in January, the Old Vic will present Matthew Warchus and Hofesh Shechter’s Oedipus, while Daniel Fish’s Elektra will run at the Duke of York’s Theatre.

But ancient Greek drama is also one of the most appealing and widely studied aspects of ancient Greek literature and culture more generally, both at school level (through the syllabuses for Classical Civilisation, Drama and English, at both GCSE and A-Level) and in Higher Education (Andújar 2023: 373).

Though the performance history of these ancient scripts has been incredibly rich since their return to the stage in the early modern period, only recently has the discipline of Classics begun considering the reception of these texts on the stage as an integral component of the texts themselves. Recent developments in this area are part of the new subfield of classical reception studies. In addition to recognising the dramatic nature of these texts in analysing and teaching them, this field also incorporates the performance history of these texts through time as part of the multiple layers of meaning they present to us today.[1]

Yet, while taking stock of their dramatic nature and how they have worked historically on the stage is indeed a step forward for the discipline as well as for the theatre practitioners wanting to engage with these ancient scripts on the contemporary stage, only very recently has there been a change in the way these texts are taught in the classroom.[2]

Practice Research, Performance Pedagogy and the Chorus

The aims and outcomes of this workshop should be inserted into this new thrust towards practice-based teaching and research practices that align with theatre and performance studies’ long-term commitment to performance as a method of inquiry and a pedagogical tool.

Our workshop combined practice research with performance pedagogy: while it aimed at producing new knowledge in the ‘ecosystem’ of scholarship, performance, and translation of Aristophanes’ Peace,[3] it also invited university and drama students to be active participants in this process of knowledge-production.

The integration of both methodologies was greatly supported by the directors of the workshop, Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari. Martinelli’s unique approach, termed the ‘non-school’, emphasises a non-prescriptive engagement with ‘canonical’ texts that often serve as the subject of classroom study. He advocates for deconstructing and bringing these texts to life on stage through a process he calls ‘messa in vita’ (‘putting into life’). As a theatre practitioner, he draws upon the ancient Greek chorus, as well as the Medieval Passions (sacra rappresentazione), up to Majakovskij’s revolutionary theatre. His theatre practice revolves around the concept of the Chorus, which transforms individual identity into collective identity.[4]

The workshop also hugely benefited from Ermanna Montanari’s long-term vocal exploration (on which she has published widely).[5] She was responsible for the warm-up exercises, through which students worked extensively on breathing, movement and voice.

Their approach was complemented by Chickenshed Theatre’s fifty years of experience bringing together young people from a variety of difficult circumstances and backgrounds and using theatre to help them develop skills, confidence and community. This combination of approaches was supported by academics from the participating universities in several ways. Lines from Giovanna Di Martino’s translation of Peace were interwoven with the students’ improvisations during the devising process and Di Martino also acted as a simultaneous Italian-English interpreter during the workshop. Lucy Ruddiman, and Zoë Carvalho Morris provided dramaturgical support during the workshop process – while also participating in the performance.

The Process: New Knowledge and Community Building

The process of bringing together this Chorus of different voices to explore Aristophanes through a collaborative combination of methods and languages was as important as the performance we created. The goal was not to re-create or re-discover meanings that Peace may have had in the ancient world, but to participate in creating new knowledge around the play, its myth-story, and contemporary theatre practices that were generated from the participants’ interactions with them. One student reflected, ‘I loved creating for an Ancient Greek show – as I had very little knowledge of shows from that period beforehand. This experience has inspired me to be more confident in trying a new approach in theatre.’ The value of this project was in the different ways in which the ‘non-school’ method combined with Chickenshed’s inclusive theatre practices to allow the student-performers to construct their own Aristophanes; one who enabled them to express some of their own concerns through performance.

Another valuable aspect of this process was the community (the Chorus) that emerged throughout the workshop. There were challenges to this: we had different groups of people (some of whom were already used to working together in a particular way, and some of whom had never worked together before); we were combining different methods of making theatre; we were exploring a play that almost all participants were unfamiliar with; and we were doing it all across a language barrier. Nevertheless, the students reported that they felt a strong sense of community in this process. One student commented, ‘I didn’t expect to build such a strong connection within such a short period of time.’ That we were able to bring this group together into a community to create our own Aristophanes was a testament to the success of the process, which we felt spoke strongly in favour of performance pedagogy as a way of exploring ancient drama.

Language and Performance

Another key aspect of this project was its multilingual nature, where language should not be merely understood as a means of communication, but as a means of being, a way of thinking and, in this case, a way of ‘feeling’ theatre. One of Chickenshed’s main organizers described this project as a valuable opportunity for students to experience something new, primarily by being exposed to people speaking different languages. From the beginning of the collaboration between Albe, UCL and the University of Parma, this has been a central aspect of the project.[6]

It was noted by one participant that one of the most exciting things was indeed to be able to ‘work in a foreign language’. Another participant spoke of the opportunity to ‘connect strangers without words’ even though they did not share a language. And again, another was surprised that though ‘we spoke different languages’, there somehow emerged a common language, that of ‘performance’.

Giovanna Di Martino is Leventis Research Fellow in Ancient Greek Literature at University College London. Her main research areas are the translation and performance of ancient Greek drama in the early modern period, in Europe and beyond. She has recently co-edited a volume for De Gruyter: Translating Ancient Greek Drama in Early Modern Europe: Theory and Practice (15th-16th Centuries) and two special issues for Skenè: Memory and Performance: Classical Reception in Early Modern Festivals. She has also contributed several journal articles on translation theory and practice of Greek and Latin texts across time. Her research interests include the reception of ancient Greek drama during Fascism (on which she has published two special issues for CRJ and Brill’s Fascism). She is the author of the monograph Translating and Adapting Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes in the United States (Skenè, 2020) and is currently working on her second monograph for OUP on Aeschylus’ Reception. Translation, Adaptation and Performance. She has several ongoing practice-research projects on the translation of ancient Greek drama and its adaptations.

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Outputs

Inclusive Theatre and Community-Building | Giovanna Di Martino, Marco Martinelli, and Dave Carey

Since the end of the project, we have been sharing the premises and outcomes of this workshop with a few audiences. First, we held an event with Marco Martinelli and Dave Carey in conversation with Giovanna Di Martino at the University of Oxford, hosted by the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, on 4^th November 2024. Here we talked about Chickenshed and Teatro delle Albe, their history and ethos, and then presented a few clips from the workshop as a result of the successful collaboration.

Roundtable on Ancient Greek Comedy as Community Engagement

We also held a roundtable discussion at the University of Bristol on 11^th November 2024 as part of the Theatre Department’s events, though the panel included both classics and theatre scholars. It was a fruitful and productive discussion led by Giovanna Di Martino and Lucy Ruddiman that (unusually) brought together different disciplines and students from a diverse range of BAs. The panellists have since been in contact and expressed a desire to continue the conversation. We hope that this indicates the possibility of a future life for this project and the value of these sorts of collaborations.

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This video is a selection of moments from the performance. Each moment is intended to illustrate a different aspect of the process that went into creating it.

• Prologue: This was to convey the war happening in the background of the play, while building a sense of chorus. The performers entered the space, fell to the floor and rose again. This was repeated a few times but is only shown once here.
• The Feeding of the Beetle: The protagonist of Peace, an Athenian named Trygaeus, has acquired a dung beetle which he intends to fly to Mount Olympus to rescue the goddess of Peace. Here the beetle is represented by half the chorus and the other half are workers feeding it dung. This scene mixes the improvisations of the participants with lines from Giovanna Di Martino’s translation.
• The Flight of the Beetle: Trygaeus flies the beetle to Mount Olympus. This scene demonstrates more of the choral techniques explored, which are drawn from Ermanna Montanari’s (the other co-founder Teatro delle Albe who was also present for the workshop) work with breath and voice.
• The Gods of War: On arriving at Mount Olympus Trygeaus finds Hermes, who explains that the other Olympian gods have left the gods of war in charge. The gods of war enter singing war songs, which were chosen and created by the students.

Credits

Directors: Marco Martinelli, Ermanna Montanari

Dramaturg and Translator: Giovanna Di Martino

Assistant Directors: Zoë Carvalho Morris, Lucy Ruddiman

Workshop Organisers: Francesca Bortoletti, Giovanna Di Martino, Lucy Ruddiman, Francesca Venturi

Cast Members: David Akubardiya, Desirè Andreotti, Yasmine Anouar, Reece Bailey-Smith, Sean Baradhi, Chiara Barresi Vannini, Luca Bartolomucci, Jacopo Rossano Botto, Sofia Buttini, Alan Campani, Zoë Carvalho Morris, Camilla Castellano, Bianca Dondi, Samuel Gould, Harry Johnson, Katie King, Bunny Kwabene, Theo Leslie, Agnes Lindstoel Wilhelmsen, Naledi-Zoe Mangrozah, Joguina Mokekola, Leonardo Morgan-Russel, Annalisa Pagani, Benedetto Loris Pizzo, Lucina Rigoberto, Lucy Ruddiman, Hamza Sogut, Giada Vendemmiati, Lily Walker, Yasmin Wilson, Kye Wolbrom.

Video Footage: Simon Gutimo.

Sponsors: Istituto Italiano di Cultura (London), UCL’s Centre for Humanities Education, Ravenna Teatro (Ravenna), the Leventis Foundation, the Gilbert Murray Trust, the Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome, the Classical Tradition, the Institute of Classical Studies, the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (Oxford), the University of Parma-DUSIC, and the WIDE European Program.

Approved by UCL’s Ethics Committee under the title ‘Theatre Practice and Ancient Greek Drama in Translation’, Ethics Number 22797/001. PI: Giovanna Di Martino.

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[1] The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, founded in 1996 by Edith Hall and Oliver Taplin, is a pioneering research centre in this field. Today, the Archive continues to serve as an interface between ancient drama and its reception, both on and off the stage, while also developing new reception through collaborations with creative artists. On the return of Greek drama to the early modern stage, see Bortoletti, Di Martino, Refini 2024; on Greek drama on the British stage, see Hall and Macintosh 2005; on Greek drama in the Americas, see Bosher, Macintosh, McConnell, Rankine 2015; on the Latin American stage, see Andújar and K.P. Nikoloutsos 2020; on the Georgian stage, see Gurchiani 2017; for a general overview, see van Zyl Smit 2016.

[2] See Mitchell-Boyask 2023; Meineck 2023; Plastow and Bullen 2024, amongst others.

[3] For the use of the term ‘ecology’ and ‘ecosystem’ in relation to any new knowledge produced around ancient Greek drama, see Plastow and Bullen 2024.

[4] Martinelli’s non-school developed in Italy, but also in France, Belgium, Brazil, Senegal, the United States and recently in the United Kingdom. See Marco Martinelli, Aristofane a Scampia, Milan, Ponte delle Grazie, 2016; Id., The Sky Over Kibera, 2019: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18358142/; Id., Aristophanes dans les banlieues. Pratique de la non-école, trans. Laurence Van Goethem, Arles, Actes Sud-Papier, 2020. For more information on Martinelli’s non-school practice, see https://www.teatrodellealbe.com/ita/contenuto.php?id=4. For more on his ‘choral’ practices, see Marco Martinelli, Coro, Genoa, AkropolisLibri, 2023, and Di Martino 2024.

[5] Ermanna Montanari, Enrico Pitozzi, Cellula: anatomia dello spazio scenico = an anatomy of stage space, Macerata, Quodlibet, 2021; Ermanna Montanari, Enrico Pitozzi, Prima voce, Bologna, Sigaretten Edizioni Grafiche, 2022.

[6] On the history of this collaboration, see Bortoletti, Di Martino, Refini 2024a, 6-7.

Bibliography

Andújar, R. (2023). Profile: Greek tragedy and performance. The Classical Review, 73 (2), 373-377. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-review/article/profile-greek-tragedy-and-performance/F526AC205991FC008F369060D629212D

Andújar, R., & Nikoloutsos, K. P. (2020). Greeks and Romans on the Latin American stage (1st ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Bortoletti, F., Di Martino, G., & Refini, E. (Eds.). (2024). Memory and performance: Classical reception in early modern festivals. Skenè: Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies, 10 (1). https://skenejournal.skeneproject.it/index.php/JTDS/issue/view/32

Bortoletti, F., Di Martino, G., & Refini, E. (2024). Preface. Skenè, 10 (1), 5-7. https://skenejournal.skeneproject.it/index.php/JTDS/article/view/465/426

Bosher, K., Macintosh, F., McConnell, J., & Rankine, P. (2015). The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (1st ed.). Oxford University Press.

Di Martino, G. (2024). Practice research, performance pedagogy, and early modern Aristophanes: Building (on) the script(s). Skenè, 10 (2), 247-292.

Gurchiani, K., Torlone, Z. M., Munteanu, D. L., & Dutsch, D. (2017). Greek tragedy on the Georgian stage in the twentieth century. In A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe (pp. 548–559). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Hall, E. (2004). Introduction. In E. Hall, F. Macintosh, & A. Wrigley (Eds.), Dionysus since 69: Greek tragedy at the dawn of the third millennium (pp. 1-46). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hall, E., & Macintosh, F. (2005). Greek tragedy and the British theatre, 1660-1914 . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mitchell-Boyask, R. (2023). Teaching the Oresteia as a work for the theatre. In P. Burian & J. Bromberg (Eds.), A Companion to Aeschylus (pp. 533-543). Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.

Meineck, P. (2023). Applied Aeschylus. In P. Burian & J. Bromberg (Eds.), A Companion to Aeschylus (pp. 518-532). Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.

Plastow, C., & Bullen, D. (Eds.). (2024). Introducing the classics ecology. In Greek tragedy, education, and theatre practices in the UK classics ecology (pp. 1-16). New York: Routledge.

Smit, B. van Z. (Ed.). (2016). A handbook to the reception of Greek drama . Wiley Blackwell.

In May 2024, an email popped into my inbox that would unexpectedly lead to a great academic experience: presenting at a national conference on student engagement. In the email from Abbi Shaw and Jesper Hansen, they were looking for students to take part in their research about how Arts and Humanities students engage with and think about AI. As an undergraduate Arts and Sciences student with an interest in artificial intelligence, faculty research being conducted about our perceptions of AI as students intrigued me, so I expressed my interest in being a part of this research. Fast forward to September, I was a student co-presenter at the 2024 RAISE (Researching, Advancing & Inspiring Student Engagement) Conference at the University of Leicester.

After expressing my interest in participating in the research, we were tasked with writing a series of reflections on five key questions and then joining a focus group to discuss them with other students. The questions were not just technical—they asked us to reflect on our personal relationships with AI, from the role it plays in our academic work to how we see it shaping our future careers. The questions were designed to enable us to dig deep into our feelings about generative AI, with questions about what reflections the term ‘generative AI’ triggers, or about how AI shows up in our daily life, or even in our studies at UCL. The introspective nature of the questions made me want to answer them and hear about what the other participants said.

A few months later, I received an exciting email from Abbi and Jesper about another opportunity: to be a student co-presenter at the RAISE Conference at the University of Leicester. If you have never heard of RAISE, it is a conference that focuses on research around student engagement, with themes like accessibility, equity, and celebrating diversity. This year’s theme was “Equity in Attainment & Student Success,” which was very fitting with the nature of our participation in this research. The purpose was to amplify student voices and make them part of the broader academic conversation. At the time, I did not know what the conference was about or what to expect from presenting, but I wanted to give it a go. So, Elisa Valentin (who has also written a blog on her experiences) and I joined the team as student co-presenters and had the chance to extend our participation.

Our presentation at RAISE focused on UCL’s ongoing efforts to incorporate a wide range of perspectives—from both staff and students—into the research process. Elisa and I shared our experiences of participating in faculty-led research, talking about how meaningful it was to be seen not just as participants, but as active contributors to the project.

Standing up there as a co-presenter, I realised that this kind of student engagement—where our insights are valued on an equal footing with those of staff—is exactly what conferences like RAISE are all about, and it fits into this broader discussion of co-creation. Co-creation was indeed a recurring theme throughout the conference, and it became clear that involving students in shaping their own learning is not just beneficial—it is necessary. Whether it is redesigning assessments, building inclusive learning environments, or making decisions about course content, there was a strong push for universities to break down traditional hierarchies and engage students as equal partners.

At the conference, there were people from various universities, all with different experiences and backgrounds, who gathered to discuss how we can reshape higher education. One of the parallel sessions that stood out to me was the one about “Why are students not attending in-person classes post-COVID-19?” by Conor Naughton (Education and Student Experience Manager at the University of Nottingham), Tom Lowe (Assistant Head of School (Student Experience), School of Finance and Accounting at the University of Westminster), and Tania Struetzel (Director of Student Success at Southampton Solent University). This session, delivered as an interactive workshop, explored the students’ perceptions of the necessity of in-person attendance after the pandemic. The majority of the room was academic staff members, and as a student, it was interesting to hear the academic staff discuss what they think the reasons for students’ low attendance to in-person classes might be.

As I listened to the discussions on post-COVID attendance, I realized just how complex student engagement is. While many staff members pointed to flexibility and convenience as factors, I found myself thinking about the importance of mental health, diverse learning preferences, and the need for universities to adapt. It was reassuring to see that the conversation was not about ‘blaming’ students for lower attendance, but about rethinking how we deliver education in a way that truly meets the needs of today’s learners.

This whole experience left me with a deeper understanding of equity in education, and how essential it is for students to be included in the shaping of our academic environments. It was pleasant to see so many educators and students working together to reimagine what inclusive education looks like. From being involved in the research to presenting at the RAISE Conference, this experience has shown me that students have a pivotal role to play in shaping not only our own learning journeys but also the broader academic landscape.

Author Bio: Selin Abdik is a second-year BASc Arts and Sciences student at UCL, specialising in the interdisciplinary application of technology. Selin has a strong interest in how technology can drive innovation and create impactful change across various fields. As a co-presenter at the 2024 RAISE Conference, Selin contributed insights on student involvement in research and policy changes within higher education. You can find out more about Selin’s work via Linkedin.

This project was supported by funding from UCL’s Centre for Humanities Education. The author wished to express their thanks to UCL CHE and the Randolph Quirk Endowment.

RAISE 2025 will be happening on September 4-5 September at the University of Glasgow.

Hi Elettra – many congratulations on receiving the Faculty Education Award for enhancing belonging! Can you tell us a bit more about your work as Widening Participation and Outreach Tutor for the School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS)?

I was Widening Participation (WP) and Outreach Tutor for SELCS from 2019 to 2023 but have worked with WP since 2016. I started by teaching a session on Italian and Norwegian for the first Y12 Residential Language and Culture Summer School run by SELCS and then ended up coordinating it the year after. I have never looked back, and WP continues to be a big part of what I do as I am still heavily involved in our Language and Culture Taster Days and Summer Schools.

Since 2017, I have aimed to design a comprehensive WP strategy that today involves colleagues across UCL and engages with a wide range of schools, pupils and teachers. Thanks to the generous support of UCL Access and WP and many UCL colleagues, I began constructing a dedicated online platform which features information about WP activities and initiatives and a library of online resources. Our yearly activities have so far included running the Y12 WP Residential Language and Culture Summer School, contributing to the Routes into Language Schools and managing a scheme called Near Peers – designed and coordinated by Terry King – which provides a platform for UCL language undergraduates to mentor school students of languages online. In 2023, I also created a programme of Language and Culture Taster Days for Y6 to Y12. This has been a great way to establish contacts with different schools: we have welcomed 50-60 pupils per taster day by dividing them into four groups and rotating them across four different activities. These include a session on why and how we study foreign languages, a visit to the exhibition ‘Not Just Words: Learning Languages through Objects and Art’, a surprise language taster and a campus tour.

During the pandemic, I also focused on providing teachers and learners with free online resources promoting innovative approaches to foreign language learning and multilingualism. These include our ‘A Language is Not Just Words’ series, which I coordinated with my colleague Christine Sas (Associate Professor in Dutch and WP and Outreach Tutor for SELCS since 2023). I highly recommend checking out these resources which so many colleagues worked on – the multilingual songs were so much fun to make!

The second series was ‘The Language and Culture Show and Tell’ series. This consists of language tasters and related materials created around objects from UCL Art Collections. This was also the basis of the above-mentioned UCL Art Museum exhibition, ‘Not Just Words’.

You’re also the academic lead and creator for the exhibition ‘Not Just Words: Learning Languages through Arts and Objects’, which promotes innovative object-based approaches to language education! Please tell us a little bit more about this exhibition and how the idea for it came about.

As I mentioned, ‘Not Just Words’’ was born out of the Language and Culture Show and Tell series, a collaboration between a group of language specialists at UCL and UCL Art Museum. The exhibition (or showcase, as my colleagues and I prefer to call it), which I co-curated with Dr Andrea Fredericksen (Curator, UCL Art Museum), opened in January 2023. It initially featured 13 short language taster videos, which take artworks from UCL’s Collection as their starting point while encouraging visitors to learn some of the basics in several languages. The aim is to showcase the benefits of this innovative object-based or, more specifically, collection-based approach to language teaching, which demonstrates that language is not just words by emphasising the connection between language and culture.

I think the showcase has shown how a collection-based approach to language teaching can successfully promote both the importance of language awareness and the relevance of university collections to academic and non-academic audiences. I was thrilled to see how the showcase encouraged more tutors (across UCL and beyond) to create similar collection-based tasters as Ancient Greek, Faroese, Hebrew and Romanian joined the series in 2023 and 2024. In fact, three more tasters which significantly expand the series’s scope (and which were generously supported by the Centre for Humanities Education) are in development now, so watch this space!

How do the objects or artworks in this exhibition impact its visitors? Have there been any particular responses sparked by this exhibition that you’d like to share? 

In this exhibition, the objects very much take centre stage. They are what visitors see even before they engage with the video tasters on the iPads. My colleague Andrea often calls the objects ‘conversation starters’ and I really like this expression. They are the starting point of the conversations we have had with colleagues who created the tasters and of the narratives developed in the videos. They have also been the source of many interesting conversations with different visitors. The focus on the object is why I am so keen to emphasise that the video series is called ‘Show and Tell’. As I often explain to the school groups that visit us, the ‘show and tell’ methodology – which they are all familiar with from Early Years settings and Primary school – offers many opportunities and allows learners to take control of their learning. It is also not dissimilar from what we call Object-based Learning (OBL), a methodology UCL colleagues have developed extensively in recent years.

While the videos are generally suitable for visitors from 15-18 years of age upwards, the objects themselves allow us to engage even younger audiences. The enthusiastic response we had from a group of Y3s (aged 7-8) when we organised a language treasure hunt in the museum will remain one of the highlights of the exhibition.

How did you grow interested in museums as a site of learning? What role do they continue to play in education?  

A bit by chance really… Museums, OBL and, more specifically, collection-based teaching are now central to my teaching, but it all started when I attended a drop-in session at UCL Art Museum in 2015. There I met Andrea and Dr Nicholas Grindle (Lecturer (Teaching) Education and Practice Development) at the Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching (now UCL Arena). They were trying to encourage more staff members to use UCL Collections in their teaching and UCL Art Museum as a teaching space. Following this session, together with then Danish language tutor Dr Jesper Hansen (who today is Associate Professor (Teaching) and Programme Director for Arena for Lecturers on Probation at UCL Arena), I began to pilot a new teaching approach to a series of joint Danish and Norwegian language classes that took place in UCL Art Museum and introduced collections-based teaching as a language learning methodology in Scandinavian Studies curriculum. Today, I try to include collection-based sessions in my teaching whenever I can: in my language sessions, literature and cultural studies sessions and public engagement and knowledge transfer events.

Can you tell us more about the language tasters you have developed, and how you view their role in making language learning more accessible to students?

Given that UCL offers the widest range of language-based degrees in the UK, the Language and Culture Show and Tell series showcases as many languages and objects in our collections as possible. We began by focusing on the foreign languages we offer at UCL while exploring objects from our UCL Art Collection but then expanded our scope to languages beyond UCL (like Faroese) and a broader range of UCL collections (like Special Collections and the Petrie Collections). For each language, the tutor produced a short video which takes an object from the UCL Collections as its starting point. Some also include a worksheet based on the video’s content.

By using objects from UCL’s Art Collections as their starting point, the language tasters digitally recreate the experience of learning through objects in museum spaces, making our collections and approach to learning as accessible as possible. As I mentioned earlier, these materials were originally designed with students in Y10-Y12 in mind. This means that, while they were created within a research-intensive university environment, they are tailored to be accessible to a much broader audience. The tasters, which are freely available online, thus allow learners to access them from their own devices, presuppose no previous knowledge and are accompanied by a full transcript.

In what ways has your research informed your teaching, and vice-versa?

My teaching projects with UCL’s collections have entirely changed the course of my research. Ever since Professor Dilly Fung outlined the UCL Connected Curriculum in her book A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education (2017), research-based learning has become a core principle behind UCL’s educational framework. As outlined in Fung’s book, student learning ‘should reflect the kinds of active, critical and analytical enquiry undertaken by researchers’. creating connections ‘across subjects and out into the world’, ‘connecting academic learning with workplace learning’, ‘producing outputs directed at an audience’ and ‘connecting with each other’ (Fung 2017, 5, 20). Working with OBL and Collections is a great way of introducing these key principles in our teaching and informing our research. At the moment, I see most of my research as an example of ‘teaching-based research’, namely research that comes directly out of exploring new teaching practices.

The collection-based Scandinavian Studies teaching project I carried out in 2016 provided the first fragments for my research while encouraging me to embrace a different approach to research, one that ultimately takes its starting point from serendipity. As I unearthed new materials these were included in my research but also fed back into my teaching. In 2021 I launched the online exhibition Nordic Fragments, where historical items from UCL Collections are combined with modern-day digital objects to explore stories of UK-Nordic connections from the nineteenth century onward. In addition to articles that analyse the impact of a collection-based approach to teaching, I am also finishing a monograph: British Representations of Modern Scandinavia: An Object-based Investigation (to be published by UCL Press). In this book, I explore the cultural contacts between the UK and Scandinavia, taking as a starting point selected items from UCL Collections. Divided into three sections (landscapes and communities, translation and remediation, research and teaching), it examines UK-Scandinavian relations and considers shifting power dynamics between these regions. With its focus on material fragments and its object-based approach, this volume also aims to give a methodological contribution to the study and use – in both research and teaching – of archival materials from university collections.

Ultimately, I firmly believe that the link between research-based education and teaching-based research is a dynamic one that reminds us of the important role that university archives, and access to them, play in the production of culture and dissemination of education.

What does belonging to a community mean to you? 

For me belonging to a community means sharing experiences and practices to support individuals and the community as a whole. Being part of a community is important, but being open to being drawn into different communities is even more important. Had my colleague Dr Annika Lindskog (Lecturer in Swedish and then Admissions Tutor for SELCS) not asked me to contribute to the Y12 Summer School in 2016, I might not have worked so much with WP. Had Andrea not pulled me into the UCL Art Museum in 2016, none of this might have happened and I would not have had the chance to work with so many colleagues from so many different fields. I really like being part of different communities, both in my professional and private life, and ultimately I think it’s when we are open to support and learn from these different communities that the best collaborations and friendships are born.

***

Dr Elletra Carbone is an Associate Professor in Norwegian Studies and Scandinavian Studies in UCL’s School of European Languages, Culture, and Society. Since 2017 Elletra has been Widening Participation and Outreach Tutor for SELCS, and in 2020 Elltra joined the UCL Art Collections Advisory Group. Elletra is also one of the directors of the non-profit publisher Norvik Press Ltd, UCL, a council member of the Anglo-Norse Society, a deputy editor of the journal Scandinavica. An International Journal of Scandinavian Studies and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of European Studies.

All images courtesy of Dr Elettra Carbone.

“If you want to learn French, you can go to Paris. But if you want to learn Latin, you cannot visit the ancient world; well, with Virtual Reality, now you can!” muses Antony Makrinos, who is an Associate Professor in Classics at UCL.

Across two workshops held in April 2024 at the Object-Based Learning Lab, Antony showed both educators and students how the classics can be taught in innovative new ways through VR.

From current-day Athens to Ancient Rome

Slipping the VR headset over your head, you jerk slightly as you find yourself floating like a bird over the modern city of Athens. You can see the sunny streets of the storied Greek city run into the distant hills as you turn your head carefully from side to side. The shining white pillars of the Acropolis and the Parthenon immediately catch the eye.

This, as Antony says, is only a small part of what VR can bring to our classrooms.

Antony uses the headsets and software of a VR company called ClassVR to take students not only to modern-day Greece but into the Colosseum in Ancient Rome — where students can duck gladiators lunging at each other in a fury of swords and watch lions lunge at them from behind bars.

Alternatively, if you are more inclined, you can also stand on Mount Olympus, home of the Greek Gods, and watch Pegasus soar through the stars.

The ability to explore these virtual environments — where you can move around and interact with objects while physically staying seated — helps enhance immersion and engagement for students, especially when paired with lessons that contextualise the VR experience.

The cube and the amphora

One can even “handle” objects through VR. Holding and manipulating a rubber cube in your hands, you can turn an amphora — a storage jar used in ancient Greece — around and around in virtual reality, peering carefully at its painted design.

This is a form of mixed reality, where physical and virtual environments are combined.

As Antony puts it: “What you feel in your hands is the cube, but what you see when you wear the VR headsets is the amphora. You are instantly introduced to the delights of virtual Object-Based Learning where one can handle any kind of object virtually.”

Incorporating VR into our learning leads us to ask how we can interact with ancient objects — and even opens up questions about what an object is.

For instance, Antony shows us that one can make a 3D object using a phone camera app and then import it into the VR application. An image of a teacup materialises before your eyes, seemingly teleported from Antony’s breakfast table to the headset. The same applies to any other object one wishes.

Students can create their own VR museums with digitised objects. An example shared by Antony has students working at UCL’s Petrie Museum, where they were able to digitise ancient mummy labels.

Advantages and challenges of teaching and learning with VR

The incorporation of VR into the classroom can make the experience far more immersive and engaging for students. It also allows students to pick up some important and increasingly relevant skills — for example, the application and usage of VR technology and other augmented reality tools in a wide range of contexts.

There are some drawbacks to consider too: VR headsets are still quite expensive, VR cannot replace face-to-face teaching, and some users complain of vertigo and dizziness while using the headsets.

Additionally, there are also limitations to the virtual environments currently generated. For example, Antony has asked whether graffiti in Latin could be added to the walls of the Colosseum so that students can approach this text and practise their language skills, but it turned out that this would make the file “too heavy”.

As VR technology continues to improve, these issues of cost, usability, and accessibility are likely to be diminished.

Overall, it is therefore not so much a question of replacing large amounts of classroom teaching with VR, but considering the pedagogical benefits some engagement with VR will offer.

For more information about Dr. Antony Makrinos’s usage of VR in teaching humanities, please get in touch with him at a.makrinos@ucl.ac.uk. He also holds VR office hours at the Department of Greek and Latin, Gordon House — please email Antony for more info. This blog post was written by Kellynn Wee.

by Selena Daly (SELCS) 

The second meeting of the Creative Teaching in the Humanities Network, in November 2023, focused on assessments and featured two speakers: Dr Akil Awan, Associate Professor of Modern History and Political Violence in the Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London and Dr Eleanor Chiari, Associate Professor (Teaching) at SELCS in UCL.

Developing the ‘Unessay’

Akil presented his use of the ‘Unessay’ as part of the assessment for his module on the history of terrorism from the 19^th century to today. Instead of submitting a traditional written essay, students were asked to complete an ‘Unessay,’ essentially a creative and critical engagement with any theme from the module. Possible formats could include a piece of artwork, a documentary, a graphic novel, a website, or a short story, among many other possibilities.

Among examples of some of the best work students submitted as ‘Unessays’ were the following: a debate between a perpetrator and victim of terrorism in Northern Ireland written as a play; a board game in which you get to play as British colonial forces or the ‘Mau Mau’ or Kenyan Land and Freedom Army; and a musical composition focusing on the immediate public responses to the 9/11 attacks and remembrance of victims of terrorism. Students were also required to submit a 500-word self-reflexive essay worth 25% of the grade.

Engaging with trauma in visual culture

Eleanor presented an assessment that features as part of an undergraduate module entitled ‘Trauma in Visual Culture,’ which had similarities to the Unessay approach presented by Akil but adapted to her particular module’s context. Its aim was to encourage students to reflect more critically on emotive side of visual culture.

Students were required to submit a portfolio of work that responded to the module’s themes and theories examined. Examples of student work included: a graphic novel-style reinterpretation of Art Spiegelman’s Maus to explore the theme of post memory in the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; a visual journal exploring the haunting legacy of Nic Ut’s ‘terror of war’ photograph from the war in Vietnam; and a video essay which explored the idea of the ‘illogical spectator’ using family home videos from before the Syrian war. If students opted to submit an entirely abstract piece, they were required to submit a 1,500-word essay on their work.

Both Akil and Eleanor identified similar advantages to adopting these kinds of creative assessments. Both highlighted their value in catering to a diverse student cohort and the way that they foster creativity, imagination, and experimentation. Creative assessments also allow students to make use of skills they may have developed in other aspects of their lives (e.g. music or art), allowing for more holistic learning.

The approach also encourages students to engage more personally with the module content and Eleanor highlighted how, for some students who accessed family stories, the assessment helped them see how the visual could facilitate processes of grief and healing. Another major advantage is the fact that these assessment types are ‘ChatGPT-proof,’ as an AI system would be unable to produce the creative outputs required of the students.

Navigating difficulties as a module convenor

Although both speakers emphasised how rewarding and stimulating these kinds of creative assessments can be, both Akil and Eleanor also highlighted some issues that any colleagues should be aware of when considering an assignment of this type. Both of these modules confront difficult and potentially upsetting topics so sensitivity is required of the module convenor in navigating these issues, especially if students opt to focus on a topic that is related to their personal experience. Both Akil and Eleanor always offered students an ‘escape option,’ in the form of a traditional essay, if they decided they did not want to attempt the creative assignment, although Eleanor said no student had ever requested it.

There is also a significant time commitment involved for the module leader. Each project must be individually approved, often through a number of meetings with students. And finally, but perhaps most importantly, was the issue of how to ensure parity between students. Marking criteria are thus crucial. Akil’s assignments were thus judged on a non-standard set of the criteria, including the following: suitability (use of a medium appropriate to the topic); engaging (the submission is readable/watchable/listenable); and originality (the submission adds something new rather than summarising existing information).

Assignments of this type require us to ask whether it is even possible to measure creativity, or, as Akil said, ‘how can we compare a watercolour and a short story?’ The answer is with careful handling, precise marking criteria and motivated and committed instructors.

The Creative Teaching in the Humanities Network is led by Dr Selena Daly (SELCS). If you have any queries or suggestions for future events and/or speakers, please do get in touch at selena.daly@ucl.ac.uk.

by Selena Daly (SELCS) 

The first meeting of the Creative Teaching in the Humanities Network got off to a great start in October 2023 with a session on Object-Based Learning (OBL). Dr Thomas Kador (BASc) led all the participants in a fun and enlightening ice-breaker session that was, literally, hands on! Each table had a black box with holes in the sides placed in front of them and we were invited to feel the object inside, to draw it and to describe it. I won’t ruin the exercise for future participants but the objects ranged from the ancient to the modern, from the natural to the mechanical.

1. Consolidating learning through creating a memorable experience 

As Thomas then explained to us, sight is vastly overplayed in teaching and education. Our sense of touch is generally forgotten and yet our fingertips are powerful analytical tools. As one participant commented, an object-handling session is a ‘low stakes way of engaging students,’ while others remarked on how a memorable experience of this kind can stay with them longer, thus consolidating learning.

2. Moving students into non-formal learning spaces

Dr Andrea Fredericksen, Curator of the UCL Art Museum, then highlighted that in her line of work you can’t touch the artworks but explained that working up close with artworks can be a transformative experience for students. She highlighted how OBL can facilitate student wellbeing by getting students into ‘non-formal learning spaces,’ which can help overcome classroom anxiety and combat stress.

3. Allowing students who are less comfortable with traditional academic essays to shine 

Next, a series of colleagues shared insights and examples of how they use OBL in their teaching practice, beginning with Dr Kirsty Sinclair Dootson from SELCS. For a module on film materiality, she has put together her own personal teaching collection of film negatives, which is often the first time students have ever encountered such objects. She encourages them to think about issues such as size, flammability and even scent, asking them what they can learn about film without watching a movie. One of her big takeaways was how the assessment based on this film stock flipped the hierarchy in the room, with those who had performed less well on a traditional academic essay excelling at this task.

4. Helping educators teach difficult histories and topics 

Dr Lucia Rinaldi, also from SELCS, highlighted her use of the UCL Galton Collection in teaching a summer school module entitled ‘The Dark Side of London,’ using objects related to the development of forensic science, fingerprinting and aspects of eugenics. She emphasised how OBL can be a powerful tool in helping educators teach difficult histories and topics, by offering an alternative access point to controversial subjects.

5. Building student confidence through introducing real-world professional situations 

Lastly, Dr Anna Maguire (History) and Jo Baines (UCL Special Collections) presented their integration of OBL into the MA in Public History. They both highlighted the importance of sustainable partnerships between academics and UCL collections and archives. Indeed, the MA in Public History programme was approved to be in collaboration with Special Collections, which, in turn, influenced how the programme was designed. One activity asks students to design a lesson plan using objects in a box they are given, with tutors then intervening with last-minute alterations to the brief, exactly as happens in a real-world professional situation. According to Anna, it was a scenario that helped build students’ confidence and made them more confident in engaging with other creative outputs.

Final reflections: what about digital objects?

Aside from showcasing the exciting work being done in the area of OBL across UCL and providing attendees inspiration for how to embed OBL into their own modules, this session also raised some interesting questions. One of the most pressing was how OBL interacts with the digital world. Kirsty also asks her students to engage with films as digital files, asking what you cannot learn from a film that has been digitised and encouraging them to reflect on the consequences of the move from print to digital.

A broader reflection raised several times was whether we should include digital objects in definitions of OBL. Out of necessity, during the Covid lockdowns work, that was previously in person and hands-on was transferred online which posed some interesting questions for the group such as ‘can digital objects be included in definitions of OBL?’ and ‘what is gained and what is lost when we encounter objects only in digital form?’. Perhaps these are questions that can be tackled at a future meeting of the Creative Teaching in the Humanities Network.

The Creative Teaching in the Humanities Network is led by Dr Selena Daly (SELCS). If you have any queries or suggestions for future events and/or speakers, please do get in touch at selena.daly@ucl.ac.uk.