The Future of Education

This paper is predicated upon the belief that academic research, especially in the field of the humanities, runs the risk of amounting to a sterile and idle exercise unless it finds ways to be effectively propagated. Venues for the dissemination of research knowledge range from conferences attended by well-versed specialists to public lectures addressing lay audiences. The undergraduate classroom falls in between these two extreme scenarios constituting an ideal platform for the diffusion of research content that has already been published or offering an arena to test hypotheses with an eye to future publication. The article aims to discuss a couple of practical suggestions for implementing an effective process of knowledge transfer from the researcher to the students. The experience of teaching a large class in Classical Mythology has informed, and perhaps limited, the reflections herein contained. It is my hope that the article will still prove useful in general terms to instructors encountering similar challenges when incorporating their research topics into the classroom setting.

My research investigates how an apparently marginal character in Homer’s Odyssey, the Cretan king and judge Minos, plays a fundamental role in the poem by offering a heuristic model for the main hero Odysseus: Minos is a conduit for Odysseus to think about his relationship with the god Zeus and the choice of justice over self-help. The topic in and of itself presents a series of unpalatable challenges for presentation to an undergraduate audience: the paradoxical importance of a peripheral character, the evidence scattered throughout the poem, and the need to interpret some passages beyond face value. In previous years, lecturing about this topic, which seemed the most obvious way to deliver the content, yielded mixed success. In the latest iteration of the course, however, some changes have resulted in an improved student comprehension of the topic. First, during lecture I consistently insisted on teasing out of multiple readings the themes of man’s rapport with the gods, the preoccupation with justice, and the unsuspected centrality of secondary characters. This preparatory work cued in the students to tackle the topic of Minos. Second, instead of simply lecturing, I assigned as work in small groups the analysis of the fragmentary evidence on Minos asking the students to think of ways in which the character might have been important within the Odyssey. The combination of foregrounding the topic and letting the students collaborate, communicate and think critically about Minos in a group environment produced far superior essays than in my past experience.