Renaissance Teaching and Learning: Humanist Pedagogy in the Digital Age and What it Might Teach Us¹

Abstract

On the surface, there would appear to be a yawning gulf between the modern seminar room and the Renaissance classroom. Materially, at least, they are poles apart. A modestly endowed university in the first world will have at least some teaching rooms with movable furniture, whiteboards, wireless Internet connectivity, a data projector, as well as more basic audio-visual equipment and a blackboard – or, failing this, aspirations to acquire these pedagogical prosthetics. The typical Renaissance schoolroom, on the other hand, would most likely have fixed (or no) seating, with a teacher’s desk or lectern at the front of the class, and may have been located in a space dedicated to other uses. While the modern classroom typically houses a group of students at roughly the same stage of academic development (although potentially diverse in other respects – age, background, ethnicity), that of the Renaissance combined students from different stages of development (from the mastery of basic English and arithmetic through to proficiency in more complex exercises in imitation and composition) but with a relatively high degree of social cohesion. The Renaissance classroom was also an all-male space, although schoolrooms in the home were often mixed-sex at least until the boys moved onto more formal schooling.²