As we reach the end of another hectic academic year, it’s time to look back on some of the visits and activities that made this Access Classics’ busiest year to date!

School visits

As ever, second-level school visits are the beating heart of Access Classics, and we were delighted to welcome hundreds of students to UCD and to travel to second-level schools: since September 2022, Access Classics has interacted with … wait for it … c. 1,300 second-level students!! Working closely with the UCD Classics Museum, and its curator Dr Jo Day, we welcomed second-level school groups from Dublin, Wexford and Leitrim to the UCD campus, where the students took part in lots of activities, including  tours of the Museum collection, artefact handling, unlocking the mysteries of ancient languages and creating curse tablets!

We also continued our visits to schools. Highlights include meeting the Transition Year students and their teacher Chantelle Delahoy in Loreto Beaufort and chatting with the newly formed Classics Club in St Raphaela’s Secondary School in Stillorgan, run by former UCD Classics student Dylan McKeever. It was great to see such enthusiasm for Classics in a school that does not currently offer the subject at Junior or Senior Cycle! We were also delighted to continue the strong tradition of collaboration beyond the UCD Classics corridor, joining forces with the UCD College of Arts and Humanities to welcome visiting students from America during the summer, with UCD Global to introduce newly arrived international students to options available for study in university, and with UCD Access and Lifelong Learning to bring Classics to DEIS-school students during a UCD Experience day in March!

Classical Association of Ireland Teachers (CAI-T) Young Classicist Awards, 2023

March was a particularly busy month for Access Classics: we hosted school visits to UCD, travelled to Cork to chat about goddesses in University College Cork and, most importantly, collaborated with the Classical Association of Ireland-Teachers (always a huge pleasure!) on two events: the Young Classicist Awards and the Leaving Certificate Lecture Day.

Access Classics’ Dr Christopher Farrell and Dr Bridget Martin joined Trinity’s Dr Charlie Kerrigan to judge the Young Classicist Awards and were blown away by the high standard! On 14 March, we were delighted to facilitate CAI-T in hosting the Awards in UCD (in person for the first time since 2020!). On the day, the finalists in the four categories – Junior Award (1st-3rd year), Senior Award (4th-6th year), Languages Award (for a project based on/with a component of Latin or Ancient Greek) and the Sustainability Award (for a project connected to Global Sustainability Goals) – presented their projects to the hundreds-strong crowd of students and teachers, with CAI-T’s wonderful Caitríona Maher acting as MC!

The students did amazing work, producing creative projects ranging from stop-motion animation videos to hand-drawn comic strips, paintings, sculptures, posters, essays, PowerPoints and even some spoken Ancient Greek! To round out the day, Access Classics’ Bridget gave a short lecture on Greek tragic drama as a preface to an amazing student-production of Euripides’ Medea! With the amount and standard of entries going up each year, we can’t wait to see what next year’s competition will bring!

CAI-T Leaving Certificate Lecture Day

Close on the heels of the Young Classicist Awards, Access Classics’ Chris organised the in-person return of the CAI-T Leaving Certificate Lecture Day, which was held in UCD on 25 March. Huge thanks to the UCD School of Classics’ lecturers who kindly gave up their Saturday afternoon to present short lectures on aspects of the new Leaving Certificate curriculum to a full house of c. 180 students and teachers! All handouts and PowerPoints from the day are available by clicking on the “CAI-T lecture day 2023” tab above. The strands and topics covered are as follows:

• Gods and Humans: Experiencing Ancient Temples (Dr Jo Day)
• Gods and Humans: Funerary Practices (Dr Bridget Martin)
• Judging them by the Enemies: Alexander and the Persians; Caesar and the Gauls (Assoc. Prof. Philip de Souza)
• Gods and Humans: Morality and Living Well in Plato’s Crito (Dr Christopher Farrell)
• Roman Spectacle: The Colosseum and Circus Maximus (Assoc. Prof. Alexander Thein)
• World of Heroes: Odysseus and Aeneas as Heroes (Dr Nicholas Freer)
• World of Heroes: The Aeneid as Propaganda (Dr Helen Dixon)

Student news

The Access Classics team was delighted to join forces with Dr Martin Brady to run the level-three Access Classics module in UCD for the third time this year! This module, which teaches students techniques of outreach and engagement, always attracts very dedicated and enthusiastic students, and this year was no exception! From conducting podcast interviews to producing posters explaining and advertising artefacts from the Classics museum, doing an amazing job with the module Twitter account (@AccessClassics) and being constant supports at Access Classics events, the students were a stellar bunch this year!

Spreading the word

 In exciting news, Access Classics will feature in an upcoming publication! Arising from a joint talk on Classics at second level in Ireland (for a Classical Influences and Irish Culture (CLIC) seminar in May 2022), Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson, Ms Aryn Penn and Access Classics’ Dr Bridget Martin wrote a chapter entitled “Green shoots on the Emerald Isle: an update on Classics in schools and communities in Ireland”  for “Class and Classics”, a Trends in Classics volume by De Gruyter. This gives an overview of Classics in and outside the classroom in Ireland, and we are particularly pleased that the chapter will be available through Open Access, so keep an eye out!

In April 2023, Access Classics launched a survey of Classics at second level in Ireland!

We sent a questionnaire to all second-level schools to gain a greater understanding of the current landscape of Classics in second-level schools in Ireland (e.g. how many schools offer Classics in some form, how many students take Classics/Greek/Latin, how many schools offer Classics at TY level), uncover the reasons the majority of second-level schools cannot/ do not offer Classics, and measure the reach and impact of Access Classics at second level, particularly the use of the Access Classics Transition Year Unit on Classical Studies. This is just the first step in some far larger plans for Access Classics, and we look forward to seeing what emerges from the responses! If you would like more information on this, drop an email to bridget.martin@ucd.ie.

Thank you!

Finally, a huge thank you to all the students, teachers, colleagues (in and outside UCD) and friends for their help and enthusiasm over the past year! It was a particularly busy academic year, and we looked forward to doing it all again next year!