‘Relaxed’ events are now common across the public Arts and Heritage sectors. Although designed with the needs of autistic children and their families in mind, they suit people with a range of access needs. Our project at The Open University asked: what would a ‘relaxed tutorial’ look like, and who might benefit from it? Across two years (2021–2023), tutors in the Department of Classical Studies at The Open University trialled a set of autism-friendly accessibility adjustments to live online tutorials for distance learners on a Roman History module. We found that relaxed tutorials were welcomed by students with anxiety disorders, caring responsibilities, chronic conditions and low confidence, as well as by autistic students. Since the project was concluded in 2023, relaxed tutorials have been rolled out across further Classical Studies modules at The Open University. Their principles and structure offer a new way of looking at accessibility adjustments which could be adapted to other teaching contexts and levels.

During the course of my teacher training, I have encountered two distinct classroom contexts for oracy: a term that refers to the ability to express oneself in speech. At my first placement school, very few students were willing to answer questions or present arguments in front of their peers. Conversely, the majority of students at my second placement school are keen to demonstrate their knowledge, yet often speak over one another during discussion tasks. In both schools, dialogue is mainly directed towards the teacher; students rarely offer extended answers during lessons, and oral reasoning and argumentation generally take place as a precursor to written work. I therefore wanted to implement a sequence of lessons where the learning was intentionally carried out and measured through student talk and cooperation. In particular, I wanted to examine how far teaching specific oracy skills and providing informal scaffolded opportunities for presentational and exploratory talk can support the development of historical thinking skills in Year 7 (age 11): in other words, students' ability to consider multiple historical perspectives; to appreciate the difference between modern and ancient values; to critically engage with historical terminology, and to present and justify an argument. Students' responses were generally positive and engagement raised. I conclude with further thoughts about future practice.

I have written this article primarily as an overview for students who are studying Greek at A level and beyond; it may also be useful for their teachers. It covers the period from the Archaic age up to the beginning of Medieval Greek (c. 750 BCE to 500 CE). There is an emphasis on Classical Greek both within and beyond the Classical period, since the Classical form, or approximations to it, has never ceased to be learned, the only form of Greek of which this can be said. It has also left a sizeable imprint on Modern Greek, especially but not exclusively on its more educated forms. I hope though that the article will serve to draw the users’ attention to the many other forms of the language apart from Classical Greek. I know that I could have done with something like this when I was a student: I was hardly aware of the existence of the κοινή, except perhaps as a form of Greek used by Christian writers long after the end of the Classical period.

This article offers small-scale research findings on the impact of narrative contextual clues as a form of scaffolding in Year 9 Latin lessons. The students of this research learned Latin via the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) (CSCP, 1998), which provides teachers and students with meaningful Latin in the form of interconnected stories (Hunt, 2016, 88). As Nuttall has argued, teaching students to read interconnected sentences and appreciate a text's meaning and overall message is what separates the act of reading from parsing vocabulary and grammatical structures (Nuttall, 1996, 2–3). Therefore, while the stories of the CLC can be read as isolated entities, the act of reading requires students to consider the overarching narratives of the stories. Furthermore, as students become confident in their Latin proficiency, it is possible to predict what is going to happen in a story just by thinking about what occurred in the previous line. For example, the first CLC story famously opens with the line Caecilius est in tablino (Caecilius is in the study). We can therefore predict that the story could take place in a Roman house and feature different rooms. Of course, this is exactly what happens in the story. This article focuses on the value of contextual clues in guiding students' predictions and promoting them to read rather than merely parse sentences. Ultimately, I argue that contextual clues, which can easily be overlooked as a form of scaffolding, serve as an invaluable aid for students when reading whole pages of Latin.

We developed and trained a custom AI text classifier to assist Latin language learners in internalising idioms, with a focus on Ciceronian composition. Idioms are mostly language-, sometimes author-specific expressions that cannot be translated directly into another language. The classifier provides interactive feedback on learners' output, effectively gamifying the process of writing in Latin and motivating students to produce more linguistic output. This not only helps learners build confidence, but also acquire a ‘toolbox’ of idioms useful for both output- and input-based activities. We present the results of our experiment conducted across a number of secondary classes in Switzerland. Our tool is freely available at https://latin-ia.hepl.ch/classifier.

The effectiveness of teaching strategies and resources that promote meaningful content learning is most pronounced when active methods such as project-based learning (PBL) are used to teach Ancient History (Molina, 2020, 53). Therefore, this study focuses on a comprehensive assessment of the methodological and historical competences acquired by students enrolled in the secondary education teacher training programme at the University of Cordoba (Spain). The research, which is non-experimental and quantitative, uses a Likert-type scale and involves the participation of 201 Masters students who have completed the course ‘Learning and Teaching Social Sciences’. The results of the statistical analysis show a positive evaluation of PBL in terms of historical understanding and its effectiveness in improving historical awareness. It is crucial to emphasise the advantages of active and collaborative learning inherent in PBL. However, it is also imperative to acknowledge the challenges that students face in applying their methodological knowledge to the secondary school setting. The transition from theoretical understanding to practical implementation is a significant hurdle for many students aspiring to a career in education. These findings underline the importance of promoting the seamless integration of innovative pedagogical approaches into teacher training programmes in order to effectively address the specific challenges of teaching antiquity in an educational context. Finally, this research was made possible by the Ministry of Science and Innovation's ‘Prueba de Concepto’ project, funded by the European Union under grant number PDC2022-133123-I00, and also by the CLIOGEN project (GINDO-UB/187) on Ancient History.