siobhanmcelduff

This last term I was teaching a course on gladiators, games, and spectacles in the Roman world. I hadn’t taught it in a while and with GenAI and such appearing, I thought I would need to change what I asked students to complete. So I asked them to do a semester long assignment based on harnessing the power of spectacle to unseat the Roman emperor Domitian (the last of the Flavian dynasty) and overthrow the power of the Roman empire. Each student was a descendant of Spartacus and the mastermind behind the plan, but they had to use a number of performers and locations for spectacles to make their plan work. Here are the strategy documents that guided their choices. (I had dedicated classes where students signed in and we worked through each assignment, which helped sort out issues and allowed us to give advice.)

I am really happy so far with the work students did and the continued investment they had in these characters and their roles even in the end of the semester. They all seem to have really gotten into taking down Domitian and working out distances and how to capture Rome without setting the city on fire. That last bit was the real difficulty.

There are also various assignments to go with these various documents, but this already seems like a lot of text….