A nice article was recently published by Concord Academy’s website about their successful collaborative project to translate the DCC Caesar into Mandarin. The project was led by CA’s Latin teacher Liz Penland, with help from their Mandarin teacher and many students. The article quotes Liz saying some very nice things about DCC:
Penland believes a classical education should not just be the mark of the elite. “Anyone should be able to study Latin,” she says. With its peer-reviewed, crowd-sourced approach, DCC is leading a charge to make the classics accessible to anyone with an internet connection. And despite an international trend of declining study of the classical humanities, thousands of students in China are learning Latin and ancient Greek.
Many high schools, colleges, and universities rely on DCC commentaries, as does Penland. By aggregating generations of contextual notes, they reveal “a chain of interpretation, of teaching, and of use,” she says. “They help the text feel more like a cultural object that many people have read.”
A little further down we see how many people were involved, students, administrators, and teachers:
Once Penland had recruited students, Adam Bailey, head of modern and classical languages, and John Drew, assistant head of school and academic dean, offered their support. It seemed the perfect project to encourage research and independent thinking. Mandarin teacher Wenjun Kuai agreed to consult with students. “Wenjun is such a generous colleague and a wonderful teacher,” Penland says. “She did so much work on the Mandarin. The students had responsibility and a voice in how the project ran. Their group work was self-directed. It was a highly collaborative process, a model of linguistic research.”
And then there is the crucial role of baked goods:
A friendly but intense competition emerged, thanks to weekly “brownie challenges” that earned baked goods from Penland. Lin, who completed numerous translations, says, “I’m not going to lie. It really motivated me.”
Liz put the fundamental purposes of DCC better than I could: access, community, intellectual inquiry. I am so proud of the folks at CA who used DCC in such creative ways, as a learning resource, but also as a way to share knowledge with others and have fun themselves. It shows the potential power of getting students involved in scholarly digital projects at every appropriate level. Here’s hoping DCC can be part of more wonderful projects like this in the future!
The Concord Academy Latin-Mandarin Project team. Photo (by Rebecca Lindegren, use only with permission): Top row from left: Ben Zide, Tenzin Rosson, Ken Lin (林鸿燊), Michael Qiu (邱阳), Anna Dibble, Lysie Jones, Elizabeth Penland. Bottom row from left: Nora Zhou (周安琪), Helen Wu (吴颖怡), Rebecca Yang (杨若祺)