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The Medieval Writing Workshop, Alex Mueller

Alex Mueller

If we compare elementary and secondary school classrooms today with their grammar school predecessors of the Middle Ages, we might find few similarities. The terrifying image of the medieval schoolmaster, seated in a chair with his birch in hand, ready to strike supplicant schoolboys for incorrect answers, does not match our more recent and comforting portrait of the teacher who circulates throughout the classroom and nurtures students through a student-centered curriculum. Yet, as an educator trained as both a medievalist and a high school English teacher, I am regularly provoked by the affinities I discover in medieval and modern pedagogies, …