The OCR Classical Civilisation GCSE (9-1) – J199 is now two years old, and had its first and much-anticipated (and worried-about) round of exams this summer just gone. This is the first of two posts reflecting on what I’ve taught and how.
What do I think of it?
As the only teacher of Classical Civilisation GCSE in my department, which tends to have a more Latin-heavy GCSE uptake, it’s been an interesting, and very busy, time. While the old spec I had taught since we brought in the qualification ten or so years ago was fine and gave students a breadth of factual knowledge to learn, for me it lacked the engaging quality of that most enticing of resources, myth and storytelling, with the exception of the Odyssey chapters that featured, and the romantic qualities of excavated Pompeii.
It also lacked a textbook, although that put the focus on me to really develop some detailed and engaging teaching materials. However, while that was a useful exercise and enjoyable at the beginning of teaching the course, trying to give students more independent tasks had always felt a bit cobbled-together, and having a sense of not knowing exactly what might be on the examiners’ minds as they wrote the exam papers because you didn’t have a whole range of specific sources at your disposal – especially if, like lots of Classics teachers I’ve met, you were actually a History or English teacher, moonlighting at your school’s request – and time spent finely combing through previous years’ exam questions for possibly-missed details to add in, every year.
The new GCSE instantly excited me due to the addition of both things on my personal wishlist: more myths, and a textbook.
A quick overview: there are two ‘Routes’ for teaching the new GCSE, called the Thematic Studies; Myth and Religion, or Women in the Ancient World. Starting with either of these as a first year’s study, you cover a lot of important details whilst also reading a lot of myth and meeting interesting characters. You then choose one of three Literature and Culture topics for the second year: The Homeric World (Odyssey!), Roman City Life (Pompeii!), and War and Warfare (Sparta! And Rome!), whilst reading selected Classical texts that illustrate each one. And, there is a detailed textbook for each bit. Did I mention that?
Caroline Bristow, now Director of the Cambridge Schools Classics Project, was the subject lead at OCR when the GCSE was redesigned and was in charge of the whole process, and kindly talked me through how the new spec came about: “I drafted the subject content, but it was under a lot of scrutiny and subject to extensive changes by the Minister [for Schools, Nick Gibb]’s office. It was written to get his approval and many edits were made at the DfE’s request.” She explains how the actual content was chosen: “When it came to actually designing what went in the course and how to “hit” all the requirements of the Subject Content Document (SCD), we did loads and loads of research. I must have led about 20 meetings in which teachers scrutinised the spec proposals and suggested content. We also worked with the existing spec and any information we could get about AQAs spec to work out what was popular. We tried to map things together to allow people to ‘recycle’ material and still teach things they liked. The eventual choice of topics were the result of 101 conversations… OCR were very supportive throughout, and whilst I was told to make something that they could afford to run, I wasn’t pressured to do anything that wasn’t academically or pedagogically sound just to cut corners.” (The SCD, the legally-binding ‘blueprint’ that the Specifications have to follow, is still available online.)
What did I choose to teach?
The spec is indeed full of very interesting things, and, if you’re like me and excited by the content of both of the Thematic Studies, it’s a difficult choice.
In the end, I’ve chosen to teach Myth and Religion, which really is heavily myth-based, perfect for my story-loving students, and gives a very decent general understanding of many aspects of the culture of Ancient Greece (Athens mostly) and early-Empire Rome, which goes well with our A-Level subject, Ancient History. To go with M&R, we’ve chosen to teach Homeric World, because, frankly, if I don’t get to teach Homer at least once a year I’ll wither and die, and also I strongly believe all students should be exposed to Homer as early as possible. Also, it rather pleasingly goes with the KS3 course I designed before the GCSE came out, which already contained the Iliad (my KS3 classes read the abridged version, ‘War with Troy’, available at CSCP) and came in very handy as the Mycenaean aspect of the GCSE course was more challenging to complete fully than expected.
As an overview, the Myth & Religion topics start with the Olympian gods of Greece and Rome, and courses pleasingly through their methods of worship (Temples, Sacrifice, Festival), their supposed interactions with mankind (Heracles, Foundation Myths), and how they and other religious beliefs shape human life (Journeying to the Underworld, Death and Burial, Myth and Symbols of Power). The topics each have specific Prescribed Sources – visual (like Temples, the Theseus Kylix, Centauromachy metopes, and more) or literary (a Homeric hymn, bits of Ovid and Livy, amongst others) – that provide compulsory examples of what’s being taught. I teach them in a slightly different order than the spec presents – Gods; Religion and the City: Temples; Festivals; Death and Burial; Journeying to the Underworld; The Universal hero: Heracles/Hercules; Myth and the City: Foundation Stories; Myth and Symbols of Power – which I find better for introducing the themes and increasingly challenging texts.
The Homeric World topic is very different however, definitely better saved til later. Aside from the Odyssey chapters, which are, dare I say it, the easy bit, there’s what appears to be a focus on a narrow slice of Mycenaean life – the citadels with their palaces and tombs, their daily life, their use of Linear B tablets – with about fourteen specific sources. However, this is a bit of a trap, as, really, a much wider knowledge of a wider collection of sources is preferable, pretty much every single thing even vaguely mentioned in the textbook.
The second half of this post, How I taught the course, will be published on Quinquennium in the next few weeks. Keep an eye out! And if you have any thoughts/ reflections/ resources, please share in the comment section below.
I was sad when the old syllabus was re-vamped.
Because my young students – mostly aged 13+ or so – a good number having additional needs / autistic / dyslexic / highly anxious not in school students – could get to grips with the subject – the vast majority of them doing Foundation as the tick box questions really allowed them to have a fair shot of getting the answers right. They loved the stories and Myths and Legends part of it.
Most of them completed the course in one academic year – the Controlled Assessment gave them a fighting chance of getting a C or D grade when the marks were added together – a fantastic achievement for most. Not a subject available in state schools in the County in which I lived so it at least gave them one of the magic 5 passes to allow them to move onto College at post 16.
A fair number would be taking English and Maths in College anyway but at least it gave a tremendous boost to their confidence in actually passing a real GCSE exam. Schools for the most part had given up on them and were already viewed as a failure whilst still CSA.
Teaching was for the most part hands on and visual. Acting act the Odyssey – drawing cartoon pictures of the sequence of events. Watching plays – You Tube – TV programmes – listening to audio books.
Whilst I would certainly agree that the new syllabus is certainly more rigorous – it is now out of reach for these students. For those who are already struggling to read and write due to years of non support in schools – giving them the Odyssey to read is pretty much a non starter. Plus it would be nigh on impossible for the younger students to get through the increased syllabus in a year. By the time they reach 15 or so – the concentration is on Maths and English – rather than Classics. It is not a required subject – so they don’t do it.
The syllabus has had to be adapted to cover the usual two years that schooled students would do. So therefore only the more capable ones now do this subject. It has effectively removed the bottom rung of student who had a passion for the subject – but not the academic capability to follow the new syllabus.
As parents have to pay for their students to take the exams – unsurprisingly – the emphasis is on those subjects that are more valued.
I’m sorry to hear it’s taken that toll. I wonder whether others will identify this impact in their contexts – I’m hoping this pair of posts will be an opportunity to flush out a range of experiences. Thanks again for your contributions: I know others out there will find this enlightening & stimulating!
My experience is similar to Jaki’s.
I am tutoring my daughter through the new GCSE, and I was also one of the first to do GCSE Classical Civilisation, many moons ago.
I was at highly academic school, but even in that top academic ability band it was clear at the time that Classical Civilisation allowed for greater creativity, and engagement for those less suited to churning out essays. It was definitely treated as the easier option for those who weren’t felt to be up to the Latin GCSE, and it felt like an easier, more creative alternative to history
.
I’ll be very interested to read your thoughts – I thought Classics Library would be abuzz with comments post-results after the first run through of the new spec, but no-one seemed to have anything much to say!
We’ve taught Roman City Life, which probably had the opposite “issue” to Homeric World. The culture component is incredibly familiar and the material can be polished off with relative ease; it’s a hybrid of the old Rome and Pompeii papers with incredibly accessible and popular sources, particularly in the Entertainment subtopic. The literature has been much more challenging; although the themes are universal and accessible when clearly broken down and articulated, the complexity of the language and references of the Horace in particular has proven a great challenge to our EAL and low ability students, and the significant overlap in themes and topics between the literature and culture components has led to confusion about what evidence to use in extended writing questions. This difficulty is clearly reflected nationally; the average mark on one literature 15 marker was 5 out of 15!
My favourite part of the course is definitely Myth and Religion, which has a great mix of topics and feels like a better preparation for A level (which is arguably much easier…!). It’s much more what the pupils I teach think they’ve signed up for by picking Classics than reading a poem about Epicureanism and corrupt auctioneers, at any rate! I’ve taught the course in textbook order, although this comes with a caveat on the “temple” front – teaching the Parthenon without teaching the Athenian foundation myth, the metopes and the Panathenaic frieze seemed very counter-intuitive (so I did all of those for the first time when teaching the temple, then revisited them in symbols of power/festivals).
As I say – really interested to see how you chose to teach the course overall!
Thanks for this contribution, ANH. As someone who’s never taught Class Civ before, the option-choosing seems to be really critical to a successful course. Do you stick with the same options each year or do you vary it up depending on the class you’re teaching that year?
At A level, I have always mixed things up. On the AQA spec at the last school I taught at, I taught a different paper every year to my U6 sets. Partly this was because I like learning and teaching new things, but also being canny with the sets I had; when I was tutoring a pupil one-to-one with severe literacy difficulties who didn’t have Eng Lit at GCSE and failed History, I picked papers where I could read the material to him confidently or required relatively little literature. I taught Socrates and Athens to a group that loved arguing about the plot holes in the Iliad more than enjoying the beautiful writing, instead of doing the Aeneid with them, etc. etc. After some good, but not spectacular, results on the Love and Relationships paper this past year, I’ve switched to teaching Greek Religion as the kids concerned wanted less reading, more “cultural background”/visual sources – and thankfully my boss at my current school agreed to this.
GCSE is a different kettle of fish, partly because at the school I teach at we have more than one Class Civ set and there’s more need for standardisation between sets and teachers (I’d guess that you all teach the same set texts for Latin at your school, rather than each set doing something different?). If I had my way, I’d jettison Roman City Life and teach Homeric World – the Odyssey’s far easier to access both in terms of literature and questions they can ask, and I LOVE Mycenaean archaeology (although admit I’m not sure how to really jazz it up for 15 year olds…) and am a bit tired of trotting out the same old chariot racing essay preps for the umpteenth year running.
However, as I’m working with colleagues who are less keen on reinventing the wheel each year and would rather stick to what they know and improve on it (an equally valid approach!) that’s not likely to happen until we’ve got a couple of years of the new spec under our belt and can see for certain whether our kids are definitely disadvantaged by studying Roman City Life.
Good to know, and makes good sense. Thanks again for taking the time to add to the content of this post. Would you be interested in producing a post yourself on any aspect of teaching Class Civ? Please drop me a line at quinquenniumblog@gmail.com if you’re at all interested – wouldn’t have to be anytime soon, but your insights do sound v valuable!