Sounding Shakespeare: An Interdisciplinary Educational Design Project in English and Music

This article outlines Sounding Shakespeare, an interdisciplinary project in Music and English, carried out with student teachers in Norway. The aims of the project are to explore and develop new ways of working with Shakespeare cross-curricularly through educational design research, focusing on creative and aesthetic processes in order for student teachers to gain experience in working across subjects, and to decrease their fear factor of using Shakespeare in the classroom. The current curriculum changes in Norwegian primary and secondary education (Fagfornyelsen) focus on experimentation, exploration and creative processes, and these are guiding educational principles that also provide a foundation for the Sounding Shakespeare project. Our research into student teachers’ experiences of working with Shakespeare’s texts, constitute the starting point for this article. In the project, students worked in two different workshops with Speech and Music Composition to collaborate and devise a performance based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream as their focus text. Through voice and prosody, students explored the musicality of Shakespeare’s text, and through music composition, students experimented with soundscapes in creative processes. In the final part of the workshops, students collaborated towards performances. Based on our collected data, our main finding shows how music can become a guiding agent for a meaningful experience of literature.

The Puck Project: A Shakespeare Performance and Ethics Program for Kids

The Puck Project is a performance-based summer program for K-6 learners in partnership with a non-profit agency that supports homeless families in Atlanta, GA. The Puck Project’s curriculum focuses on the ethical toolkit individuals acquire when they embark upon a journey of performance. The project’s aim was to cultivate skills relevant to building a community, formulating and expressing ideas as a team, reading and responding to the emotions of others, and accessing and attending to emotions in oneself. Together these skills serve a larger aim of cultivating what Gretchen Case and Daniel Brauner have called “empathetic imagination.” Central to empathetic imagination is translation, a powerful framework for pedagogical aims such as “transfer” and “carrying over.” The Puck Project de-centers the dramatic text in favor of the learner’s lived realities. Using Rex Gibson’s theory that the ambiguities of Shakespeare’s plays provide the soil in which actors may create their own meaning and experience, the Puck Project encourages performers to provide their own translations of a script based on their unique histories. We discuss how young performers are able to make connections about embodied expression, emotional intelligence, and broader forms of literacy.

Modern, yet “full of forms, figures, shapes, objects”

With over four hundred years separating today’s millennials from Shakespeare’s plays, it is little wonder that students and teachers have pegged Elizabethan English as difficult—if not impossible—to understand. Generally, the motivation for students who seek such resources or for teachers who furnish them comes from a shared assumption that Shakespeare’s language is indecipherable to today’s audiences—or, just too difficult to grasp. There are even some students (and, teachers) who operate under the false premise that Shakespeare’s plays are composed in Old English, a language that thrived centuries prior to Shakespeare’s earliest works. To make visible the troubling implications of so-called “modern” or “contemporary” translations of Shakespeare’s works, I will look to Shakespeare’s most academic play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, to propose how today’s students are complicit in dismissing Shakespeare for his words as much as audiences of Shakespeare’s time laughed away Holofernes. In addition to surveying a critical history of supplementary resources designed to ease the burden of Shakespeare’s language, an analysis of Holofernes’ stage presence will offer a natural opportunity to explore what happens if we willingly replace Shakespeare’s English for English that is perceived as easier—or, according to some outlets, even truer. This article sets out to complicate the facility and pervasiveness of such contemporary translations by calling attention to the language lessons Holofernes teaches through his folly, revealing that such work is, “not generous, not gentle, not humble” (Love’s Labour’s V.ii.617).

“Wisely, and slow. They stumble that run fast”: Learner-Friendly Shakespeare in an EFL Classroom

This paper discusses a learner-friendly and student-centred approach to introducing Shakespeare for less advanced English language learners in the university-level EFL classroom. Shakespeare becomes welcome material when the input is comprehensible and enjoyable. In this light, the teaching should first start with the story rather than the language. After hooking students by recounting stories from Shakespeare, the teacher needs to familiarise them with the authentic language through activities carefully designed to initiate them into the language. In approaching the content of Shakespeare’s plays, the students are asked to relate themselves to the world of Shakespeare through active methods advanced by the RSC and the world that students already know. Raising language awareness in learners rather than being taught the language, the students become less frustrated while learning to appreciate Shakespeare.

Teaching Shakespeare through Collaborative Writing and Performance in a Norwegian Primary School ESL Classroom: An Interview with Ellen Marie Kvaale

This interview outlines the experience of Ellen Marie Kvaale, primary school teacher in Hoberg Primary School, in Stange, Norway. She discusses her innovative three-year project introducing three of William Shakespeare’s plays to 5th, 6th, and 7th -grade ESL students. Her project successfully employed challenging pedagogical methods that resulted in student performances, as well as student publications. The project was designed to develop their written and communicative skills in English with students producing multimodal written texts and collaborating on all levels of scene writing, performance design, and production. Building on her project, Ellen Marie also held workshops at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences for pre-service teachers in which her primary school students participated. Her experience demonstrates the value and efficacy of using Shakespeare and his texts in ESL Primary School classrooms through active and interactive approaches, including performance, music, and collaborative writing that effectively engaged the four basic language skills.

Perchance to Read: Developing an Augmented Reality Game to Increase Student Engagement with Hamlet

Hamlet (and similar texts) can be difficult for students to follow initially. Often when students read, they may gloss over the text, missing key contexts. These problems lead to a lack of engagement in the literature classroom. The use of videos can help, but this often deters reading. This dilemma prompted the development of an Augmented Reality (AR) application to enhance Hamlet. By ‘zooming in’ on specific elements of Hamlet—Act I Scenes IV and V (the ghost scenes)— students explore and gain valuable information on the context behind these scenes. Students discover their perspective on a key question in the play; is the ghost real, or is it coinage from Hamlet’s brain? Students can arrive at a more concrete understanding of their own thoughts and take away a better grasp of both the context of the scene and the character of Hamlet through their active participation in the application. Primarily, this article will highlight the dramatic effect student experience, both real and perceived, had on the development and execution of the application. The goal is to convey the pedagogical questions addressed when conceptualizing the application: the desired learning outcomes, the perceived student audience, and the need to connect game actions to the text of the play. It is one thing to speculate what students may want/need in such an environment from an instructor’s perspective. It’s another to analyze student and instructor feedback to help highlight critical areas more effectively. Students not only learn through their actions in the app; they help create the design of the application through their feedback. The article will detail the development of the application through this user input and the impact of praxis on its iteration.

Taking the Ache Out of Sh(ake)speare: Teaching Shakespeare's Plays Through Performance

This paper discusses the experience of teaching Shakespeare’s plays in performance, staging the plays with the students as part of the learning experience. The learning outcomes are treated in three sections – the first relating the effects of performance on the students’ linguistic proficiency, the second giving some examples of how the students discover and learn to master the mechanics of Renaissance theatre from the inside, and the third and final section trying to show how making the play their own, understanding and identifying with their part, gives the students new insights that are applicable in a wider context.

Re-posing the Question

Guest editor Delilah Bermudez Brataas' introduction to the special issue on Shakespeare in/and Education

England, whose England?

A review essay of Adriana Neagu, Continental Perceptions of Englishness, ‘Foreignness’ and the Global Turn. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2017.

Shakespeare, Art and Artifice: An Interview with Stuart Sillars

Ahead of the publication of his forthcoming book, Shakespeare Seen: Image, Performance and Society (Cambridge, 2018), Stuart Sillars sat down for an interview with Perry McPartland. The discussion revisited a number of topics that Sillars has explored in his various publications on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare’s aesthetic strategies of transformation, the relationship his work takes to the visual, and the uses to which Shakespeare puts aesthetic artifice. The interview was conducted in two parts over a very nearly adequate Skype connection in the summer of 2018.