Heinrich-Heine-Universität
Hauptseminar: Teaching English Literature
from Medieval Times to the Early
Renaissance
5. Semester

The Late Middle Ages in England –
An Introductory Lesson in Class Nine

von: Gaby Schneidereit

List of contents

1. Introduction page 3

2. Main part: My fictitious lesson page 4

2.1 Information on the course of the unit and general teaching aims page 4
2.2 Warming-up page 6
2.3 Motivation page 7
2.4 Introduction of the new subject matter .page 10
2.5 Assimilation page 14
2.6 Homework page 15
2.7 The choice of the teaching aids used page 16

3. Conclusion  page 18

Appendix  page 21

1. Introduction

The following piece of work entirely dedicates itself to the era of the Late Middle Ages. My model lesson does not concentrate on a particular aspect of this era, but gives an overview of a lot of topics. It can therefore be regarded as a multifunctional preparatory lesson: the first step into the overall thematic is portrayed and lots of occasions are given to find different fields to reflect upon. I prefer this open – but fixed – thematic because my target is not to provide the pupils with an overdose of facts. I want to offer them a general idea, an outline of the Middle Ages and would rather like them to understand the mentality of this time than to learn too many facts and dates by heart. According to the authors of the SMART-study, my approach is right: “the need to provide an overview, a framework, a sense of unity and coherence [is characterized as] centrally important”1.

Apart from that, I pursue the aim of enabling the children to read medieval literature. The knowledge of the medieval way of thinking is an important condition in order to study written works dating from this era. It is interesting that we are looking back to ancient times because of two reasons: on the one hand, we want to get an impression of the living conditions which formed the background of medieval literature. On the other hand, “medieval history and literature […] [are] simply essential to a proper understanding of our own [stress: Ga.Sch.] society, which is not only heir to, but to a large degree the creation of, the Middle Ages”2. Consequently, this epoch actually does not need any justification, its significance even in today’s life makes it obvious enough why we should deal with this topic at school. We live in a society which is coined by the Middle Ages, and this has to be mirrored in school life as well – “we cannot study literature or political history […] in isolation; all of our studies are ultimately studies of the entire culture of the Middle Ages”3. That implies that the Middle Ages, their diversity and mysteriousness, their inventions and effects on our present time, are just part of our general knowledge, and one cannot avoid to be confronted with them.

In my essay I will design a fictitious English lesson in a ninth class of a Grammar School. To begin with, I will depict an invented class situation; afterwards I will illustrate each teaching phase of the lesson and give reasons for my approach as well as the media used as teaching aids. In the role of the master I want to make the learners realize that the Middle Ages extensively influence many fields even of our present time and let them submerge into the sphere of English.

2. Main part: My fictitious lesson

2.1 Information on the course of the unit and general teaching aims

The following model lesson is designed for a ninth class of a Grammar School, the equivalent to the highest school form in Germany. The class consists of twenty-eight pupils being fifteen or sixteen years old, with an asymmetrical distribution of seventeen girls and eleven boys which is typical of nowadays. Today they are starting with a new teaching unit called “The Late Middle Ages under the Reign of King Richard II (1377-1399)”. The teacher’s intention is to give basic information on the background of the period first; this will enable the pupils to deal with passages of Geoffrey Chaucer’s masterpiece, his ‘Canterbury Tales’, which date from this time. Chaucer’s date of birth cannot be more specified than to the time between 1340 and 1345, but he unquestionably died in 1400. This is the time span on which the class is focusing – the Late Middle Ages. The English lessons are held three times per week, so their timetable allows them to deal with this unit within the next six weeks. In my essay, I am only portraying the first lesson about medieval times, lasting fo rty- five minutes. This lesson is an introductory one into the overall topic of the Middle Ages and has as its target to arouse interest among the children and to stimulate their involvement in the whole unit. This basic introductory lesson will be inevitable, even if some issues are revealed as repetition; the pupils need to be made familiar with the atmosphere and mentality of this era to understand Chaucer’s work or other written pieces of his contemporaries. Even the interpretation of Shakespeare can be practised through this unit, due to the fact that his plays are set in the Middle Ages. And because traces of the epoch are still visible today, the topic will quickly raise attention and interest among the pupils. Boys playing with knight castles in younger ages, movies like ‘The First Knight’, “the popularity of pseudo-medieval settings in the fantasy fiction of Tolkien”4 or ‘real’ sirs and ladies in Britain’s House of Lords; even after more than five hundred years are the Middle Ages common in our time – because they present “another world of thought and experience”5, are strange and familiar at the same time. This is an advantage the teacher can make use of to accelerate the pupils’ attention as well as their progress within the seminar.

The second phase of this lesson will provide the pupils with further topics for their group research projects of the next weeks in which they have to become absorbed themselves. Possible topics are ‘medieval family structures’, ‘knights and tournaments in the Middle Ages’, ‘medieval literature’ etc. In the planned course of the unit, they have to present their topics in class and allow the ir fellow students to discuss them in plenum.

[...]

1 Robert V. Graybill, Robert L. Kindrick & Robert E. Lovell, Teaching the Middle Ages; Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (Missouri: Warrensburg, 1982) 28.

2 Ibid., 3.

3 Ibid., 6.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.