MEDIEVAL TEXTS FOR INTENSIVE STUDY: METHODS AND STRATEGIES OFFERED BY VIRTUAL REALITY Anca MAGIRU School of Law and Public Administration Constanta, SPIRU HARET University, 1 Sabinelor Street, 900685, Constanta Romania Ionel MAGIRU Faculty of Letters, OVIDIUS University of Constanta, 1 Sabinelor Street, 900685, Constanta, Romania [email protected], [email protected] Abstract: The ambitions of this paper are: 1. to discuss how virtual reality can offer various possibilities of teaching medieval texts, especially the Arthurian legends, making them attractive, while stimulating students’ imagination and their desire to read and learn more; 2. to highlight the importance of e-learning and teaching environment which can address to content analysis by using story-telling, simulations, role-playing, games, discussion, interaction and others as e-learning methods and strategies. Keywords: Medieval Legends, Lexical Analysis, Semantic Fields. I. WHY DO WE TEACH MEDIEVAL TEXTS? “Great works in fiction are the ardous victories of great minds over great imaginations” [1]. The main purpose of teaching literature in the English and French classes is to communicate aesthetic values and stimulate a sense of personal involvement and reaction that will enrich the students‟ experience. The medieval texts are not far from our own experiences, as the medieval writers create characters and contexts with which the students can identify and project themselves into them imaginatively in order to live new experiences and relate them to their own feelings, ideas, thoughts. There must be a certain balance between fact and fiction and from this point of view these texts are a very good example. The medieval legends are creative as they stimulate the students‟ attention and imagination; interesting as they are related to their interests; diverse as they motivate their interests; practical as they deal with real life and communicate something for the writing purpose; comprehensible as their content is clear. II. WHY THOMAS MALORY? Thomas Malory‟s series of stories has delighted five centuries of readers. The Arthurian tales, that mixture of myth, adventure, love story, enchantment and tragedy, live in his work as the essence of medieval romance, yet always with a contemporary relevance. Our students show an evident interest in the eternal interaction of the Otherworld with our own dimension, a theme which forms a constant backdrop to the tales of Arthur and his heroes, their loves and their adventures. It is an old theme and, at the same time, a very modern one; a theme dealt with in fairytales, myths, legends, and nowadays, in paranormal activity and psychic experience; while the secrets of immortality, of harmony with the earth, of true love and spiritual fulfilment, of these wandering men and women, who appear and disappear in an ever more bewildering fashion in the very many scenes of the countless texts, are other aspects of deep interest for our students. Although Thomas Malory wrote in the middle of the 15th century, his texts are accessible, interesting and tie-in with movies. We step in a world of magic, we witness and take part in strange and terrible adventures; we meet shape shifting magicians and enchantresses, wild beasts possessed of intelligence greater than that of their kind, serpents which turned into beautiful women if anyone dared to kiss them, invisible foes who struck from nowhere, demons and ghosts and knights whose armour changed colour in the blink of an eye. Even the landscape itself seemed unearthly, with its underwater bridges, fountains which boiled or ran with blood, trees one half in flame and the other in green leaf, wasted lands which grew green again at a single word. Magical weapons, magic rings, horses and bridles, swords pulled from stones which floated on water, ships which sailed by themselves and chess pieces moved by unseen hands – these are but a few of the elements which go to make up the world of the Arthurian tradition. “The circumstances of knights in armour are remote from us, and interesting in their remoteness, yet the symbolic power of The Morte Darthur can also speak to the enduring contemporary need to reconcile the individual‟s demands with those of society, to recognize and cherish personal integrity, and true love, and to create a good society” [2]. The Arthurian legend, in its remotest origin Celtic, a medieval best seller in the 12th century, which developed in the various European languages into perhaps the largest single body of imaginative literature that the world has known, “survives into the modern world as a living work only in English, at the hands of almost its last remodeller, Sir Thomas Malory” [3]. However, we must consider The Morte Darthur [4] a great work of art which has to be fully evaluated. If one shows interest in all these stories, one should use the “Search” mechanisms at the Labirinth site [5] to find out how one can get more information on Merlin, on daily life in the Middle Ages. One should go to the Sourcebook created by Paul Halsall [6], or the links created on the page for the course in Medieval Technology and Everyday Life offered by Paul J. Gans [7]. One can make new discoveries by finding the Camelot Project home page and by looking closely at Arthur, Guenevere and Lancelot‟s actions. Malory‟s work is a gem of the medieval literature, a masterpiece which must be known by and taught to our students, a starting point in enjoying literature and acquiring deeper knowledge of it. III. MEDIEVAL TEXTS FOR INTENSIVE STUDY: METHODS AND STRATEGIES OFFERED BY VIRTUAL REALITY The following is a sample lesson plan of a Malorian text offered as a mere suggestion of how we can teach such texts, apparently boring in the 21st century, by using the latest technology, namely, virtual reality, thus supporting pleasant student learning and creating student interest in the story. Sample Lesson Plan Level: advanced Subject: Sir Lancelot and Queen Guenevere Purpose: to develop the students‟ knowlwedge about courtly love; to create students‟ interest in the story by using e-learning methods Episodes: they contain information on the sinful love between Lancelot and Guenevere; Type: cultural information 3.1 Teaching Objectives: O1: to help students to understand the cultural background; O2: to create student interest in the e-story; O3: to pre-teach vocabulary; O4: to help students to understand the plot; O5: to help students to understand the characters; O6: to help students with difficult vocabulary; O7: to help students with language and style; O8: to help students to interpret the main themes of the story; O9: to help students to understand the narrative point of view; O10: to teach the students something about the ethic of courtly love in the Middle Ages and make them express their feelings, opinions, attitudes regarding the subject: the sinful love between Sir Lancelot and Queen Guenevere. 3.2 List of Suggested Tasks and Activities Using Methods and Strategies Offered by Virtual Reality Pre-reading Activities 1. a. Warm-up activity: helping students with cultural background by playing a 5 minute video/DVD scene from a love-story film. b. Creating interest in the story. The instructor should forward to the students, some quotations about love. The students are supposed to look at them and decide which ones they agree or disagree with, which are are positive and which are negative. (E.g.: All you need is love. Love is madness. Love means never having to say you are sorry. There can be no peace of mind in love. Love is sweet for a day.) Then the students are invited to compare their written opinions with others, in their group, by forwarding them to their fellows, and think of great love stories in literature and history and say whether they had happy or tragic endings. c. Cultural context. The instructor helps the students to reconstruct a boarder cultural context for characters: Lancelot and Guenevere, and events, such as: type of housing, likely daily occupations for men and women in upper-classes, class and gender attitudes. The students are asked to answer the following questions, after they have watched the film, Merlin, based on computer simulations (directed by Steven Barron, starring Sam Neill and Isabella Rossellini): 1. How far are the events and characters socially constructed? 2. How would a change of cultural context affect the effects? This is a way of helping the students to identify social and cultural influences on characters and events, to engage and motivate them, while providing them with alternatives to e- text, and in supporting differences in background knowledge. d. Costume design [8] Students should use computer simulations which are computer- generated versions of the real-world objects, in our approach, costume designs. The instructor asks the students to think about and decide on how a character (e.g.: Lancelot) or a group of characters (e.g.: Queen Guenevere, Sir Bors, Agravain, Mordred, Arthur, etc.) should be costumed, including personal suggestions; or how a costume should be designed for a particular event (e.g.: fight) or place (e.g.: Queen‟s room in the castle) in the e-text. Then designs are discussed, illustrated, made or written as notes and put in an e-iconic folder which can be accessed by the students and any interested readers. Here the instructor dwells on aspects of descriptive imagery. Making people and places more concrete and immediate, drawing attention to detail and contextual clues, help the students to establish a cultural context [9]. 2. The instructor suggests that the students should do a mini-project on the historical background to the story that is life in England in the early 15th century and the students should present their projects as posters on computer [10].