The Peopling the Past Project: Multivocality and Multimodality in Ancient Mediterranean Studies Teaching

This chapter outlines the development and design of educational resources by the Peopling the Past project, a collaborative digital humanities initiative that produces and hosts open-access multimedia resources for teaching and learning about people in the ancient Mediterranean, West Asian, and North African worlds. Project resources include blogs, videos, and a podcast, which can be integrated into relevant courses to promote authentic and significant learning. Learning science research demonstrates that student engagement can be enriched through the use of media that target different modalities of learning, particularly interactive tools and rich-format content; learning is further enhanced by the integration of media presenting the work of numerous specialists, broadening the voices and perspectives presented to students. This multivocality is critical in the field of ancient Mediterranean studies, which remains deeply entangled with racist and exclusionary agendas that have impacted how scholars communicate knowledge. By promoting multivocality and multimodality, the teaching media produced by Peopling the Past can be used by instructors to develop student-centred constructivist learning experiences that provide opportunities for significant learning and for students to engage more deeply with peoples and histories that are chronologically and geographically distant.