Expanding the Ancient World Workshop

This workshop will take place online; a Zoom link will be provided via email to registered participants.

Registration is required at THIS LINK.

Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. Keyed to the NYC Department of Education Social Studies Scope and Sequence, this program is designed to offer K-12 educators opportunities to develop their knowledge of the ancient world and to provide classroom-ready strategies for teaching the past with reliable sources. Featuring inquiry-based workshops, flexible lesson plans, and up-to-date research, Expanding the Ancient World aims to equip teachers with information and skills that they can share with their students. CTLE credits will be offered to New York State teachers.

This workshop uses the prompt of a newly started digital project to consider how large scale narratives and individual objects can be integrated into curriculums and into classroom experiences. The project is Global Approaches to Early Representations of the Human Figure, currently browseable at https://gaerhf.org. GAERHF - as it's known - starts with the broad premise that we as a species - as a group - have been looking at ourselves for a long time and have been making images of ourselves for a long time. The phenomenon is pervasive enough so that representing it in digital form and encouraging exploration via a website supports an art history that allows for many narratives to be present at the same time. Many cultures made images of the human figure. Sometimes those cultures were in dialog with others, thereby creating narratives of mutual influence. But that is not always the case. Regardless of degrees of contact, GAERHF can be a tool for recognizing complexity and sophistication in many pre-modern societies. Its scope is approximately 50,000 BCE to 1500 CE and it includes figures from anywhere they are made and in any medium. Within this large-scale context, individual objects are represented in such a way that users - educators or students - can define and explore flexible ranges of time and space as they consider how to frame the global approach inherent in GAERHF.

The workshop will start with an introduction to GAERHF. This will include an introduction to the digital technologies underlying the site but the focus will be on the content and the interactions it supports. Breakout groups will be given prompts as to possible uses of GAERHF in the classroom and for assignments. Because GAERHF is a very new project, these prompts will be practical but it is also hoped that the educators present will provide feedback that will inform the future development of this resource.

Workshop led by Sebastian Heath (Clinical Associate Professor of Computational Humanities and Roman Archaeology, ISAW).

Participants will receive 1.5 CTLE hours.

If you have any questions regarding the Expanding the Ancient World program please email ETAW@nyu.edu.

Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.

ISAW is committed to providing a positive and educational experience for all guests and participants who attend our public programming. We ask that all attendees follow the guidelines listed in our community standards policy.