Elements in Shakespeare and Pedagogy – serie

Anti-Racist Shakespeare argues that Shakespeare is a productive site to cultivate an anti-racist pedagogy. Our study outlines the necessary theoretical foundations for educators to develop a critical understanding of the longue durée of racial formation so that they can implement anti-racist pedagogical strategies and interventions in their classrooms. This Element advances teaching Shakespeare through race and anti-racism in order to expose students to the unequal structures of power and domination that are systemically reproduced within society, culture, academic disciplines, and classrooms. We contend that this approach to teaching Shakespeare and race empowers students not only to see these paradigms but also to take action by challenging and overturning them. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Teaching Shakespeare through performance has a long history, and active methods of teaching and learning are a logical complement to the teaching of performance. Virtual reality ought to be the logical extension of such active learning, providing an unrivalled immersive experience of performance that overcomes historical and geographical boundaries. But what are the key advantages and disadvantages of virtual reality, especially as it pertains to Shakespeare? And more interestingly, what can Shakespeare do for VR (rather than vice versa)? This Element, the first on its topic, explores the ways that virtual reality can be used in the classroom and the ways that it might radically change how students experience and think about Shakespeare in performance.

Reading Shakespeare through Drama arises out of case study research which focuses on reading as a socio-cultural practice. Underpinned by theories of reading, learning, drama and play, it is, nevertheless, rooted in the everyday work of secondary English classrooms. Utilising the dialogic ambiguities inherent in Shakespeare's playscripts, this collaborative approach to reading pays particular attention to adolescent readers as meaning-makers and cultural producers. The authors examine different iterations of 'active Shakespeare' pedagogies in the UK, the USA and Australia, drawing a distinction between 'reading through drama' as an approach and the theatre inflected practices promoted by well-known arts-based institutions. Observational and interview data highlight the importance of addressing issues concerning identity and representation that are inevitably raised by the study of canonical literature. Importantly, this Element situates teachers' practice within broader ideological contexts at institutional and national policy level, particularly from the perspective of England's highly regulated system of schooling.

This Element presents three case studies of interactive digital editions of Shakespeare incorporated into classroom teaching: WordPlay Shakespeare, PerformancePlus and myShakespeare. Each interactive edition combines the text of a Shakespeare play with a recorded performance. The case studies seek to understand whether and how interactive Shakespeare editions support ambitious teaching, where students are expected to engage in authentic academic tasks, experience social learning (dialogic rather than didactic), and demonstrate their new knowledge through meaningful assessments. In our time of pandemic and considerable public contention over equity and justice, ambitious teaching further requires attention to the whole selves of students - their psychological and social development as well as their intellectual attainment. This Element examines the opportunities that interactive digital editions give teachers, software developers and scholars to connect Shakespeare's works to twenty-first century students.

Shakespeare and Place-Based Learning explores the potential of place for enriching Shakespeare pedagogy. Positioning place as a complex, multiperspectival phenomenon with stories and voices of its own, this Element considers place a partner in the learning process. The opening section traces the development of place-based education, culminating in a conceptual framework for use in Shakespeare pedagogy. Shakespeare and Place-Based Learning then examines how regional Australian students understand place in the Shakespeare classroom and presents a new definition of place designed for literary studies. This Element also investigates the challenges and potential of outdoor Shakespeare education through a case study of outdoor theatre workshops. Shakespeare and Place-Based Learning culminates with a pedagogical model and practical activities. This model aims to develop a learner's sense of place in two ways: through deepening their authentic engagement with and knowledge of Shakespeare's texts, and by expanding critical awareness of their environmental responsibilities.

This Element engages with one of Shakespeare's greatest thought-experiments: How does one navigate the 'theatre of the world'? It invites students to examine how Shakespeare challenges this metaphor's vertical hierarchies in response to shifting understandings of cosmological order. Teachers will find rich contextual frameworks for exploring how Shakespeare envisions 'worlds' as emerging from dynamic variables, raising urgent questions about how identity and justice are environmentally constructed. Focal plays include A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello. Each discussion features student centred 'Explorations'. These play-specific classroom activities can also be adapted across Shakespeare's corpus and tailored for both secondary and university-level students. These exercises encourage non-linear critical and creative thinking, inviting students to contemplate big ideas and generate new perspectives about the shared points of contact between Shakespeare's world and their own.

The pedagogy of acting out Shakespeare has been extensive. Less work has been done on how students learn through spectatorship. This element will consider all within the current context of Shakespeare teaching in schools. Using grounded research, it will include work undertaken on a schools National Theatre production of Macbeth, as well as classroom-based, action research, using a variety of digital performances of Shakespeare plays. Both find means of extending student knowledge in unexpected ways through encountering interpretations of Shakespeare that the students had not considered. In reflecting on the practice of watching Shakespeare in an educational context- both at the theatre and in the classroom- this Element hopes to offer suggestions for how teachers might re-think the ways in which they present Shakespeare performed to their students particularly as a powerful way of building personal and critical responses to the plays.

Shakespeare and Neurodiversity argues that the Shakespeare classroom should be a place where neurodivergent learners flourish. This Element addresses four key areas: questions of reasonable adjustments, the pace of learning, the issue of diagnosis, and Shakespearean neurodivergent futures in education. Throughout, the Element provides activities and theoretical explanations to enable students and educators to understand how these four areas of Shakespeare education have often been underpinned by ableism, but can now become sources of neurodivergent flourishing.

Teaching pragmatics, that is, language in use, is one of the most difficult and consequently neglected tasks in many English as a Second Language classrooms. This Element aims to address a gap in the scholarly debate about Shakespeare and pedagogy, combining pragmatic considerations about how to approach Shakespeare's language today in ESL classes, and practical applications in the shape of ready-made lesson plans for both university and secondary school students. Its originality consists in both its structure and the methodology adopted. Three main sections cover different aspects of pragmatics: performative speech acts, discourse markers, and (im)politeness strategies. Each section is introduced by an overview of the topic and state of the art, then details are provided about how to approach Shakespeare's plays through a given pragmatic method. Finally, an example of an interactive, ready-made lesson plan is provided.

Shakespeare and Blended Learning charts a distinctive perspective in Shakespeare pedagogy that connects best practices of in-classroom activity to those of online learning. A blended approach to Shakespeare, we argue, stands to make his works more engaging, accessible, and relevant to students in the digital age. Drawing on established evidence-based research and best practices in blended pedagogy, course design, and assessment, and applying them to a range of plays including Hamlet, King Lear, The Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night, and 1 Henry 4, we contend that teaching Shakespeare does not demand a choice between in-person and online learning but rather maximizes engaged student learning by combining the two. This book will appeal to readers who wish to update an extant course with dynamic digital approaches or who seek more formalized, sustained training on how to teach Shakespeare with technology.

Building on a general trend in academia towards convergence in teaching and research, in which interdisciplinarity and relevance are cornerstones, Transdisciplinary Shakespeare Pedagogy offers a sense both of the opportunities and challenges in teaching Shakespeare beyond the confines of the English literature department by setting up structural partnerships across disciplinary units and provides possible ways forward on the road to wider cooperation, collaboration and integration between curriculums, teachers and students of different disciplines. With Shakespeare studies increasingly under fire, the author analyses, through four recent case studies of university courses for a variety of students, the potential for integration of Shakespeare studies, social sciences and societal challenges.

Drawing on critical insights from the history of emotion and Shakespearean emotion studies, this Element offers a pedagogy rooted in a historicist approach as a stimulating alternative to the teaching of Shakespeare's emotions as universally and transhistorically relatable. It seeks to provide a roadmap - by way of contextual and analytical frameworks and suggested learning activities - for teaching students how to mind the gap between Shakespeare's emotional moment and their own. The benefits to this approach include not only students' enhanced understanding of Shakespeare's plays in the context of early modern emotion culture but also their enhanced ability to think historically and critically about emotions, both in Shakespeare's day and now.

Active approaches to teaching Shakespeare are growing in popularity, seen not only as enjoyable and accessible, but as an egalitarian and progressive teaching practice. A growing body of resources supports this work in classrooms. Yet critiques of these approaches argue they are not rigorous and do little to challenge the conservative status quo around Shakespeare. Meanwhile, Shakespeare scholarship more broadly is increasingly recognising the role of critical pedagogy, particularly feminist and decolonising approaches, and asks how best to teach Shakespeare within twenty-first century understandings of cultural value and social justice. Via vignettes of schools' participation in Coram Shakespeare School Foundation's festival, this Element draws on critical theories of education, play and identity to argue active Shakespeare teaching is a playful co-construction with learners and holds rich potential towards furthering social justice-oriented approaches to teaching the plays.

Based on real experiences of teaching Shakespeare in diverse classrooms and outreach programmes, this Element questions the role of authority in Shakespeare teaching. It connects an understanding of how Shakespearean texts function with critical thinking about teaching, especially derived from the work of Jaques Rancière. Certain elements of the Shakespearean text - notably how it was intended to teach its first readers, the actors, and its uses of dramatic irony - are revealed as already containing possibilities for more decentred forms of knowledge production.

What are we teaching, when we teach Shakespeare? Today, the Shakespeare classroom is often also a rehearsal room; we teach Shakespeare plays as both literary texts and cues for theatrical performance. This Element explores the possibilities of an 'embodied' pedagogical approach as a tool to inform literary analysis. The first section offers an overview of the embodied approach, and how it might be applied to Shakespeare plays in a playhouse context. The second applies this framework to the play-making, performance, and story-telling of early modern women - 'Shakespeare's sisters' - as a form of feminist historical recovery. The third suggests how an embodied pedagogy might be possible digitally, in relation to online teaching. In so doing, this Element makes the case for an embodied pedagogy for teaching Shakespeare.