Bringing the Middle Ages to Life: Students Create Award-winning Teaching Resource

Bringing the Middle Ages to Life: Students Create Award-winning Teaching Resource

by Christine Elstub and Jennifer Little

Talented undergraduate students are bringing the Middle Ages to life for local high school students. Eight students have been recognized for their contributions to Giovanni Boccaccio’s One Hundred Tales, a web-based resource bank hosted on ArcGIS StoryMaps. The maps, set up like a virtual museum, combine the students’ work of text, images, maps and other digital elements to explore the tales of 14th-century Italian book The Decameron. It is designed to help educators teach the Middle Ages and is accessible to teachers at all 70 Ontario school boards.

The students, as part of Signs, Meanings and Culture, a secondyear course at Vic, recently won an Experiential & Work-Integrated Learning Ontario (EWO) Student of the Year Award for their efforts.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s One Hundred Tales was developed as a class project but it was created in partnership with the Niagara Catholic District School Board, whose feedback helped ensure the content meets Ontario curriculum guidelines while addressing the needs of diverse learners.

Victoria College instructor, Teresa Russo, was inspired to launch the project after hearing from high school teachers about their challenges in finding a Medieval text that students could relate to. She believed The Decameron— a collection of short stories narrated by a fictional group of friends who escape to the countryside during the Black Death (1346 to 1352)—would be relatable to students who had experienced the COVID-19 pandemic. “If students who are now in elementary school study The Decameron when they get to high school, they’ll remember back when they had to wear masks and learn online.”

According to Russo, “Seeing the students receive this award makes me realize what we created is really important for our community partners.” The winning students were recognized for their ability to connect The Decameron to modern-day issues of class, gender, race and, of course, the pandemic. For instance, Rion Levy, a literature and critical theory specialist student of Victoria College, explored how nonchalant attitudes about travel during both the Black Death and COVID-19 pandemics contributed to the spread of disease. “We always knew that if you travel, you’re going to spread what you have or be more likely to catch something. In my lifetime, we had never really spoken about that until now, so I made the connection that this has happened throughout history yet we’re still repeating the same mistakes.”

Russo, an expert in Medieval studies, was supervised by President Will Robins while working on her dissertation at the Centre for Comparative Literature and was able to guide students towards his research on Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Levy also found Robins’ The Decameron Eighth Day edition useful for his discussion of the Mediterranean Sea as a symbol of movement and connectivity, while others used the resource to address additional issues. “One student considered the idea of consent that grew out of the #MeToo movement. Students went beyond the scope of the project by investigating social and gender issues that are still debated in our community today,” explains Russo.

Seeing the students receive this award makes me realize what we created is really important for our community partners.

- Teresa Russo

Beyond adding an award to their resumes, the students gained workplace skills such as teamwork, communication, and the ability to make complex academic concepts relatable to a general audience. “So far at the University, I have learned how to communicate with scholars,” says Levy. “No one has asked me to communicate with the world. The challenge to communicate in an engaging manner with high schoolers is one I am incredibly grateful to have had this past semester.”

Russo’s students completed 38 of The Decameron’s 100 tales. She plans to continue the project and to have the remaining 62 stories completed by 2023. “Knowing the resource will be used by educators for years to come is especially rewarding,” says Levy.