With the trees in leaf, it must be time to look back on another packed academic year of visits and events for Access Classics!
Each year, we try our best to accommodate as many school visits and events as possible as these are central to Access Classics’ mission to extend the reach of Classics in Ireland. We were delighted, then, to be able to meet more than 1,000 teachers, students and parents this academic year, and to welcome back old friends (such as the Dundrum College of Further Education) and meet new ones (such as St MacDara’s Community College). Once more, Access Classics worked very closely with the UCD Classical Museum, especially with Sasha Smith, to expand the amount of student visits, offer a wide range of activities and promote the ancient world through, for example, its artefacts, history, literature and languages. We had great fun introducing students to the wonders of the Museum and its handling collection alongside Greek language workshops and a range of Classics-related talks. Below are some highlights from the year!
CAI-T Leaving Certificate Lecture Day, 2025
Across a busy April, we had the enormous pleasure of collaborating with the Classical Association of Ireland Teachers (CAI-T) on two important events: the Leaving Certificate Lecture Day and the CAI-T Young Classicist Awards!
We always love hosting the CAI-T Leaving Certificate Lecture Day in UCD, and this year was no exception. On 5 April, we welcomed ca 170 Leaving Certificate students and their teachers to the UCD campus to hear a range of lectures on topics connected with the Senior Cycle curriculum. Huge thanks to the UCD School of Classics’ lecturers who kindly gave up their Saturday morning/afternoon to present and to CAI-T’s Delia Donohoe for her help with organising and spreading the word about the day! All PowerPoints from the day are available by clicking on the “CAI-T lecture day 2025” tab above. The strands and topics covered are as follows:
1. “Greek and Roman funerary practices” (Dr Bridget Martin)
Strand 4: Gods and Humans; Learning outcomes 4.9, 4.10 and 4.11
2. “Gods and Humans: Morality and Living Well in Plato’s Crito” (Dr Christopher Farrell)
Strand 4: Gods and Humans
3. “Judging them by their enemies: Alexander & the Persians; Caesar & the Gauls” (Associate Professor Philip De Souza)
Strand 3: Power and Identity
4. “Greek Tragedy: The Dionysia” (Dr Suzanne Lynch)
Strand 2: Drama and Spectacle; Learning outcomes 2.4 and 2.5
5. “The Failure of Aeneas in Aeneid 2” (Dr Martin Brady)
Strand 1: The World of Heroes; Learning outcomes: 1.2, 1.3, 1.5, 1.8, 1.9 and 1.10
6. “‘The same night awaits us all’: Death in Horace’s Odes” (Dr George Prekas)
Strand 4: Gods and Humans; Learning outcomes 4.13 and 4.14
Classical Association of Ireland Teachers Young Classicist Awards, 2025
Access Classics’ Dr Bridget Martin joined Trinity’s Dr Charlie Kerrigan to judge the Awards this year, and, as ever, the range and creativity of the projects was amazing! The students were set the challenge of creating a project based on any aspect of Classics to compete in five awards categories: Junior Award (1st-3rd year), Transition Year Award, Senior Award (5th-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). On 29 April, the finalists and their teachers and fellow students came to the beautiful, sunny UCD campus to display and present their projects. Dr Martin was on hand on the day to meet the finalists and have a chat about their projects! Under the steady hand of CAI-T’s Séamus O’Sullivan, the Awards went off without a hitch!
As every year, the students presented a dizzying array of projects, from beautiful poems, to paintings, hand-drawn comics, excellently researched essays, stop-motion animation, videos and original songs. As an added treat at the end of the Awards, students had the chance to visit the Classical Museum, take part in a role-play game or hear about Greek and Roman journeys to the Underworld! Well done to all students on their fantastic entries – we’re already looking forward to seeing what you create next year!
Spreading the word
The collaboration between Access Classics and the UCD Classical Museum bore fruit in 2024 in the form of an article in Museum Ireland (volume 30), arising from our paper at the Irish Museums Association’s “Education and Outreach Forum” (June 2023) in the beautiful surrounds of the Law Society of Ireland, Smithfield. In this article, entitled “Working Towards Inclusive Education with the UCD Classical Museum and Access Classics”, we discuss the aims, successes and challenges of our collaboration in attempting to increase access to and inclusion in Classics. Check it out here!
Access Classics was also delighted to speak to the UCD Widening Participation Outreach Network (9 October 2024) and at the Classical Association of Ireland Teachers annual conference in Maynooth (11–12 October 2024) about the successes and challenges of the programme. It’s always brilliant to chat with others engaged in outreach and, especially, with the teachers who are getting such amazing results from their Classics students at second level!
Access Classics even made its way into Dr Bridget Martin’s presentation at the conference “100 years of leaving certificate Greek and Latin: Histories, challenges, possibilities” (held in the Long Room Hub, Trinity, and organised by Dr Charlie Kerrigan and Mnemosyne Rice). In her contribution, entitled “Accessing the Classical languages at second level: Challenges and opportunities”, Bridget argued in part for the importance of outreach in spreading knowledge about ancient Greek and Latin, and thereby increasing access to the same.
Considering that the new specifications for Senior Cycle Greek and Latin are coming onstream in September 2025, this was a timely, uplifting and inspiring conference!
Coming soon!
Hot on the heels of the launch of its 2nd edition, the Access Classics Transition Year Unit is about to undergo another transformation! The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment announced a revised Transition Year Programme Statement (TYPS) in September 2024. Under the TYPS, Transition Year Units will be superseded by micro-modules. We are working very hard to re-imagine the Unit as a micro-module and will make this available (free of charge!) to all schools in time for the 2025/26 academic year. In the meantime, you can check out the Unit as it currently stand here.
Thank you!
Finally, a massive thank you to all the students, teachers, colleagues (in and outside UCD) and friends for their help and enthusiasm over the past year! As every year, we are inspired and humbled by the drive to expand access to Classics in Ireland, and we can’t wait to join in all over again in the next academic year!
Access Classics 