Schools Outreach
Through co-productive and participatory strategies students were invited to think critically about the role of digital media in education and key questions associated with the ancient historical texts, such as the effects of war on human society, democracy and decision making, and ‘historical truth’ against debates on fake news in the public domain.
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Students were given a set of ancient and modern materials (texts of Herodotus and Thucydides and tweets on the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a test case) and associated hints to reflect on and interact with, in a hands-on manner and through a variety of activities.
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The schools outreach took shape as two visits with Cathays High School in Cardiff. The project team visited the school site to run the first half of the delivery before the students visited the University campus for a follow-on day in which they worked with the project team and the Arts and Social Studies Library (ASSL).
Workshop 1 - School Site
Students began by learning about the historians Herodotus and Thucydides through 'fact-files'. They learned about their background, works, lives and relationships to gain an understanding of who these men were and when/where they lived. This enabled the students to apply context when looking at the texts later on.
In small groups, students engaged with short sections of text from either Herodotus or Thucydides. Through scaffolding questions, they were supported in exploring their extracts and develop source analysis skills. Students were asked to summarise the content of their passage and demonstrate an understanding of how war was represented by ancient historians. From this, higher order thinking was encouraged to consider the importance of truth and memory in writing history and the affects of war on people and society within the text, thus requiring inference and the use of their fact-file knowledge. After the analysis, groups had 2 minutes each to present their findings to the class.
The final activity required students to engage with how ancient history has influenced and been used in modern media. Each group were provided with a range of images from the modern media including films, games, TV and product branding to analyse. This was then used as inspiration to create their own concept for modern media using the histories they have read. This led to a variety of fun ideas including red olive oil in a Spartan-shaped container, a clothing line inspired by Spartan armour and a gym group that uses the Greek heroes from Herodotus and Thucydides for their marketing.
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Workshop 2 - University Visit
(His)tory travels...
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The same students engaged in the first visit were invited to the university for a continuation of the project. We began with a game of telephone to help the students understand how time and communication can change how texts are received, leading to changing understandings or misinterpretations.
As a class we then discussed an article about the use of Spartan imagery in the January 6 US Capitol Attack. This enabled students to engage with use of ancient images as a class to create a safe space. The class also co-created ground rules for discussion with the project team to ensure conversations were productive and safe for all to get involved.
Herodotus and Thucydides in modern-day tweets
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In groups, students were given excerpts of Herodotus and Thucydides that aligned with modern day tweets that used the historians when talking about the Russo-Ukraine war. Students were asked to work out what had travelled from ancient to modern, including similarities and differences. They were supported by the project team to identify 'ingredients' such as characters, plot, place, emotions, events, objects and quotes in both ancient text and modern 'tweet' to aid in their comparison. Once how they texts had travelled had been considered, students were asked to consider why the texts were used to talk about the Russo-Ukraine war on X and the relevance of the ancient text to the modern day. Each group then presented their findings to the class.
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Create your own textual travel in time...
The groups were then asked to create their own social media post using the ancient texts. They were given complete freedom in how to present their textual travel including TikTok, Instagram, X and blogs. They were encouraged to use the 'ingredients' identified in the previous task to help their creations and explain how the ancient texts have travelled to their piece. This lead to a lot of fun and laughter in their fantastic creations. TikToks formed the most popular medium for this activity. There were group raps to support Leonidas, a series of instagram posts from Athenians and Melians and a 'Get Ready with Me to Wage War' TikTok by 'Cyrus the Great' aka. '@CyrusThePreppyKing'
After finishing the workshop, the students were taken to the ASSL where they engaged with two sessions with the library staff. One used the library catalogue to find books relevant to ancient history and the media. This demonstrated how to use a university library and the breadth of material covered in a humanities degree/library. The others participated in a session on understanding biases in the media and how to critically analyse articles to be aware of agendas put forward by authors.
The impact of the workshop was assessed through asking questions before and after the session for quantative data. Qualitative comments were also collected at the end of the session. See our impacts page for more information.​