Randolph-Macon College Professors Bart Natoli (classics) and Janet Hayatshahi (theatre) co-presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South (CAMWS), which was held April 11-14, 2018 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Hayatshahi and Natoli presented Bringing Seneca’s Thyestes to Life: Integrated Project-Based Learning in the Latin and Theatre Classroom, an interdisciplinary project they developed for their Latin and theatre students in 2016. The paper is under review for publication in the journal Teaching Classical Languages.

Project-Based Learning
“Over the past 30 years, pedagogical theory and practice on nearly every instructional level have seen a shift away from a traditional, teacher-centered model to a more active, learner-focused model,” explains Natoli. “One of the major ways in which this shift can be seen is the increase of integrated Project-Based Learning (PBL) models in the classroom—approaches that fuse together PBL and interdisciplinary pedagogies and have been shown to improve content learning, real-life skills, and sustained motivation in learners. However, nearly all published research on integrated PBL in the secondary language acquisition context has been focused on modern language instruction and not on the teaching of classical languages. Our paper addresses this dearth of scholarship by detailing how we used an integrated PBL model to construct and deliver two courses—one advanced Latin and one intermediate Theatre—at
RMC.”

From Original Translation to Performable Script
In 2016, students in Natoli’s Advanced Latin course created an original translation of Seneca’s Thyestes, complete with stage directions and suited to the English idiom. At the end of the course, the translation was given to students in Hayatshahi’s Intermediate Theatre course, who further developed—and reimagined—the translation into a fully-performable script. Hayatshahi’s students created a complete set, cast actors, and put on six performances of the play in Cobb Theatre as part of the Theatre Department’s 2016-2017 season.

A Student-Created Project
“This project was entirely student-created: the original English translation, the script, the costuming, the acting,” says Natoli.  “Professor Hayatshahi and I simply set the parameters and let the students create something unique. So it is wonderful that we had the opportunity to showcase at a national conference the incredible talents of our students. The project has been an exciting, rewarding process, and I look forward to our next classics-theatre collaboration!”

Hayatshahi says, “In our paper, we detail the implementation of PBL in the courses that we taught, including a reflection on the qualitative and quantitative results of the courses. What we found is that the interdisciplinary model provides a playground for exploration and deep investigation of the work. We, in the theatre program, would probably never have brought Seneca’s work to our stage had it not been for this project. Being given the opportunity to learn from a process that traveled through translation into adaptation for the stage provided an incredible experience for our students.”