"Teaching Latin with AI" Workshop Follow-up

When I gave my first talk about using chatbots to teach Latin at an DH@MIT talk in 2019, it had an air of pedagogical futurism: something to the effect of “look at all of the amazing ways you’ll be able to use computers in the Latin classroom… someday!” Fast forward five years—spurred by OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT—and “someday” is … today. We have already seen on this blog a discussion of what kinds of Latin language tasks ChatGPT does well on and at a recent talk at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of New England I helped an audience of Latinists understand how to make profitable use of the new technology. On May 2, in collaboration with the New York Classical Club, we brought this conversation to ISAW, hosting a workshop for local K-12 teachers called “Teaching Latin with AI.''

The goal of the workshop was to provide a positive, teacher-focused review of how Large Language Models (LLM) can be used to produce a variety of Latin teaching materials, all without knowledge of computer programming or related technical skills. As ISAW Head Librarian David Ratzan and I saw things, the discussion of LLMs in the humanities had so far focused largely on the potential for AI to interfere with learning and assessment. The point of departure for this workshop was different: to leverage the real opportunities this technology represents for Latin pedagogy. Over the course of the hour-and-a-half workshop, I helped the Latin teachers in the room hold conversations with the chatbot, create novel short Latin stories (Aeneas attends a Taylor Swift concert, anyone?), and generate reading comprehension questions and grammar quizzes based on these stories through minimal prompting of the LLM. In a gesture toward building better AI literacy among teachers in the field, participants were also given a “crash course” in LLM basics to help better understand the technology.

“Teaching Latin with AI” is the ISAW Library’s first “technological” contribution to the ISAW Expanding the Ancient World Series, a series of talks and workshops started in 2022 with a goal of “[offering] 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.” Discussion at the reception following the event suggested enthusiasm for more similar programming in the future.

This fits well with other research and teaching taking place at ISAW. The ISAW “year of AI” started straight away in early January with a panel on the role of AI in the future of Classics research that I co-organized for the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies. This semester, Sebastian Heath and I taught a course called “Generating Antiquity” that both helped students develop the technical skills necessary to build LLM-assisted research projects and the theoretical skills necessary to critique the project’s outcomes. In addition, I have a forthcoming article in the New England Classical Journal on how chatbots can be thought of as computational collaborators with teachers and students using active Latin in the classroom. And this is just a sampling of our ongoing work in the ISAW Library to meet the technological moment.