June 11, 1997

In Web-Based Class, Harlem Students Explicate Dante

The patricidal Menendez brothers were consigned to one of the lowest circles of hell, the region of the treacherous. The Rev. Al Sharpton, meanwhile, was placed in the circle of heretics, after it was decided he had used religion to sow discord instead of harmony. And former Senator Bob Packwood was condemned to eternal damnation among the lustful.

From the Digital Dante students' project

Such were the stern judgments meted out recently by a group of Harlem high school students who had spent a semester reading Dante's Divine Comedy, while using the Internet to better understand and draw connections between the medieval world and the 1990s.

"They were almost doing a Divine Comedy themselves," said Jennifer Grossman, a teacher in the project.

Dante's masterpiece depicts heaven, hell and purgatory as complex territories populated by historical and

literary figures as well as the Italian poet's own contemporaries. The three regions are divided into intricate subdivisions based on fine distinctions between various sins and virtues.

The idea behind the class, which the students took on their own time after school, was to give teen-agers an understanding of the Italian classic by having them read the work, then replace the denizens of Dante's realm of the afterlife with figures from the 1990s.

The students, mostly 11th graders from Frederick Douglass Academy, a public school geared for the college bound, were also required to use the Internet extensively for research. Many of the students come from homes without computers and were using the World Wide Web for the first time. Even so, they quickly learned to conduct searches on Italian sites to learn more about Dante and his time and look at news sites for background on modern figures.

The curriculum and the web site on which it is based -- Digital Dante -- were both developed by the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University's Teachers College. Among other things, the site contains the original Italian version of The Divine Comedy, as well as two English language translations and illustrations by great artists.

"It was meant as educational space with the integrity a scholar is looking for, but you can include things that make it interesting for young students," said Jennifer A. Hogan, a Teachers College research assistant who developed the site and the curriculum.

From Digital Dante

For Sandra Lloyd Blackman, a Douglass English teacher and self-described "very traditional teacher," the beauty of the project was that the Web gave students exposure to a rich variety of materials -- the multiple translations, for example -- unavailable in most classrooms. "I'm not sure the students understood each particular of the work," she said, "but I do think they had a deeper understanding than perhaps I could have done just using the text."

By the end of the course, the students were required to prepare a web site-based multimedia presentation using sound, graphics and text to show which modern figures they had placed in heaven, hell or purgatory. They also had to justify their decisions.

Last Wednesday at the Countee Cullen Public Library, which overlooks some once-gracious but now abandoned brownstones in Harlem, the students appeared on the last day of the course before a small group of guests to render their judgments.

Antonio V. Torres was one of the guides through hell, home of everyone from the mob turncoat Sammy (The Bull) Gravano (placed among the fraudulent) to the infamous Menendez siblings.

"Their parents gave them everything they wanted and needed, but for some reason they still killed them," Torres, a senior at Douglass, said of the Menendez brothers. "To me, that was the worst betrayal ever."

Not all contemporaries were treated harshly. Ross Perot was sentenced not to hell, but to serve time in purgatory among the envious in that region. "You want everything that you cannot have, such as the Presidency of the United States, although you have more power than the average man," the students wrote.

Picking candidates for heaven proved the most difficult task of all, the students said. In the end, Jackie Robinson (who beat out Michael Jordan for a spot among "souls who loved and exercised justice"), Mother Teresa and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. were among those granted spots in Paradiso. Closest to God, the students decided, was Mohandas Ghandi.

After their presentations, as the students munched on refreshments or gave teachers and other visitors tours of their Web site on computer monitors set up for the occasion, they reflected on what they had learned. Many had enrolled in the course to gain computer skills, they said, but they allowed that in the end they had enjoyed Dante's poetry as much as they had learned about how to place a photograph on the Web.

For much of the semester, they had engaged in discussions of profound issues raised by the work, like whether God allows man to exercise free will. What intrigued many of the students most, however, were Dante's visions of hell.

Christina N. Nichols, a junior dressed in the Douglass school uniform -- white top, black or navy blue bottom -- said she was particularly struck by the appropriateness of the punishments Dante selected.

"Take fortune tellers," Nichols said. "Their heads were placed backwards so they could only see the past."