Club Hellas Presents: An Interdisciplinary Model for Team-Teaching Greek Civilization.

A team-taught course on Greek civilization was designed to reach a broad audience of majors and non-majors at the University of New Mexico and has changed in response to faculty and student responses. The first version of the course covered Greek and Roman culture and presented a variety of guest lecturers, but student comments indicated that too much material was covered. The course was cut in half and transformed into an interdisciplinary Greek civilization course taught by two professors. The course was advertised through a widespread cross-listing to appeal to as many students as possible. Distributing flyers was effective in recruiting 140 to 170 students each time the course was offered every spring for 4 years. The current version of the course is divided into Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greece, with a heavy emphasis on the first two. The instructors rely mainly on primary sources to accompany the lectures every week. The instructors have tried a variety of strategies to provide small groups of students with access to instructors, since the department does not have enough money to hire discussion section leaders. The exams follow the tried-and-true essay format. Students unanimously agree on the effectiveness of using slides to accompany lectures. The success of the course has led to the petitioning of the university to add a new interdisciplinary major and minor in Classical Civilization. (The syllabus is attached.) (RS)