News & Notes from TEAMS

TEAMS Launches Secondary School Project

The committee spent much of the 1997-98 school year creating a draft proposal. Because the secondary school market is so large and diverse, it quickly became apparent that traditional means of reaching it were likely to prove inadequate. Better, the committee felt, to take advantage of the Internet, using it as the primary vehicle for disseminating information, though with CD Rom and hard-copy alternatives also available. Further, because so many different subjects and grade levels were potentially involved, and because so little agreement exists on the specifics that need to be covered even in courses seemingly on the same subject and at the same grade level, the committee concluded that it would be foolish to try to create textbooks, lesson plans, and model syllabi for complete courses.

Better, we thought, to concentrate on the creation of a series of totally independent teaching modules, each of which would take about a week of class time. None of them would depend on material in other modules, and all would emphasize sources, not secondary literature, both to reduce the problem of interpretive bias and to eliminate the need for repeated updating revisions. In effect, this modular approach would give maximum flexibility by allowing teachers either to insert modules of their choice into existing courses as a form of enrichment or to build wholly new courses by linking modules together in any way that they choose.

As envisaged in the draft proposal submitted to the TEAMS Board in May, the basic modular package for a teacher would include: a short teacher's manual on the subject and how best to approach it; the sources for the unit; visual or audio-visual materials on aspects of medieval life most related to the topic; a brief bibliography; links to other relevant Web sites; lesson plans; sample questions for quizzes, exams, and term papers; and, possibly, an interactive link to the module's creator or to other TEAMS volunteers willing to respond to teacher comments and inquiries in timely fashion. The student version of this package would be similar, but in place of the teacher's lesson plans and sample questions it would substitute an interactive component encouraging involvement in, and deeper understanding of, the module's content.

The evening after the TEAMS Board gave preliminary approval to this draft, the committee then presented its recommendations at a symposium held during the 33rd International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo. Interest was lively and comments penetrating, out of which the following points emerged: an immediate need to involve secondary teachers in the process of transforming abstract proposal into concrete project; the desirability of developing a demonstration module to illustrate how this approach would work and what its benefits are likely to be; the advantage of networking with as many other college and university teachers as possible since they are apt to prove the most frequent developers of ideas for individual modules; and, most crucial of all, the need to identify potential sources of funding and to begin the application process.

So, where do we go from here? Already several secondary teachers have expressed interest in becoming involved in the planning process, but if you are one such and similarly inclined, I would urge you to let me know via e-mail, the committee's preferred means of communication. And the same is true for college and university teachers who would like to work on developing specific modules. The address is charles.t.wood@dartmouth.edu. As for funding, the wheels are turning, albeit slowly. TEAMS itself cannot submit funding proposals; rather, they have to come either from individuals or from the institutions at which they teach. Because I am officially retired, neither I nor Dartmouth is an appropriate seeker of funds since, even though I am continuing to teach part time, my liminal status is likely to undermine any and all applications of which I am the source. I have, therefore, appealed for volunteers from the other members of the committee, at least five of whom are or have been directly involved with secondary education, and it looks as though one or more of them will prove willing to take on this most crucial of all our challenges. With any luck, then, we are now well on our way to realizing the Grundler dream that got us started.

For the Record

Net assets, which may also be thought of as our "endowment fund," were $27,500 at the end of our 1997 year (fiscal year-end was February 28, 1998). This was an improvement over the $22,300 of the 1996 year, but still lower than the $32,500 of 1995. Significant fluctuations in this balance before 1997 occurred under the terms of a production-underwriting agreement for TEAMS publications, which has now been replaced by a straight royalty arrangement.

Interest income and royalties on sales of TEAMS publications were projected to be about $5,000 for the year ending February 28, 1999. Expenses should be lower: All of the officers and board members are volunteers in the financial sense, while other administrative costs, such as office supplies, have been running at a modest $50 to $100 per year. The most significant expenses recently have been related to TEAMS publications, including a contribution to the editorial operations of the Middle English Text group (which was matched by NEH), and a subsidy for illustrations to be used in a TEAMS volume. The next largest category of expenses has been officers' travel. The budget for the current year includes about $4,000 in expenses, total, with the remaining income to go to the endowment.

TEAMS Executive Board

Notes on Teaching Resources

Teachers and students at all levels will enjoy an interactive site on life in the Middle Ages developed by the Annenberg/CPB Project Exhibits Collection: http://www.learner.org/exhibits/middleages.

Victoria Arthur writes: "I am looking for any and all activities, lesson plans and bibliographies that can be accessed by way of computer or not. I'll be happy to share it when it's all compiled. Reply to: skyranch@ together.net."

Middle English Texts Series Continues to Grow

The editions maintain the linguistic integrity of the original work but remain within the parameters of modern reading conventions. The texts are printed in the modern alphabet and follow the practices of modern capitalization and punctuation. Manuscript abbreviations are expanded, and u/v and j/I spellings are regularized according to modern orthography. Hard words, difficult phrases, and unusual idioms are glossed, either in the right margin or at the foot of the page. Textual notes and a glossary appear at the end of the text. The editions include short introductions on the history of the work, its merits and points of topical interest, and brief annotated bibliographies. Perhaps best of all, the volumes are priced affordably.
 
 

New in the Middle English Texts Series: Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love  Edited by R. Allen Shoaf ISBN 1-58044-001-0 (paperbound only) $20.00  This edition of The Testament of Love is the first to be published since W. W. Skeat undertook the task in 1897. Since the work does not exist in any copy of Usk's lifetime but only in William Thynne's 1532 edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Others, produced nearly 150 years after Usk's death, "traditional" editing was impossible. Instead, in this edition, a diplomatic transcription of Thynne is printed with, contrapuntally, a pointed version of the text which presents the effort of R. Allen Shoaf, the editor, to construe it. In his introduction to the volume, Shoaf writes: "I offer the contemporary reader the constant choice, in the absence of any other choice, between the sixteenth-century editor's, Thynne's, construction of Usk and the twentieth- century editor's construction of Usk, mine."

Forthcoming in the series:  Prose Merlin ed. John Conlee (December 1998)

"The traditions of mystical theosophy elucidated and taught by Jews in Provence, Catalonia, and Castile in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries have come to be identified as the intellectual Kabbalah. The present volume contains one of the most important and earliest texts composed in this tradition, along with two briefer late thirteenth-century examples of its use" (p. ix). "The commentary of Rabbi Ezra ben Solomon of Gerona (d. ca. 1245) on the Song of Songs is one of the most important texts of the first clearly identified circle of Kabbalists, those operating in the Catalonian town of Gerona at the middle of the thirteenth-century" (from the Editor's Note).

ISBN 1-58044-000-2 (paperbound only) $10.00

The complete MIP catalogue is online at http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/mip/index.html.
 

News and Notes from TEAMS is published by The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages, Inc.  We welcome articles, news items, letters, and announcements related to the teaching of the Middle Ages. Please send items for publication by August 15 or February 15. Editor:  Karen Saupe  Department of English Calvin College  3201 Burton SE Grand Rapids, MI 49546 E-mail: ksaupe@calvin.edu

Past issues of News and Notes from TEAMS are archived on the TEAMS web site at http://www.calvin.edu/~ksaupe/teams.htm.