The power of the liberatory classroom is in fact the power of the learning process, the work we do to establish community.
—bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 153

 

Too often we think the work of fighting oppression is just intellectual. The real work is personal, emotional, spiritual, and communal.
—Bettina Love, We Want to Do More Than Survive, 51

 

As teachers of Shakespeare increasingly reckon with the growing influence of critical race studies on the understanding of premodern literature and culture, many recognize now what Kim F. Hall argued a quarter of a century ago—that this work offers students access to a history and literature profoundly meaningful to their own lives.^[1] Indeed, the common Shakespearean pedagogic practice of making the strange familiar, and the seemingly familiar strange, increases in effect when students discover the complex connections and dissonances of a premodern Shakespeare in which their worlds and lives figure and resonate. This is especially true when they are invited to explore the nature of racialized power and injustice in Shakespeare. As Hall and Peter Ericksen argue, “Race, as an ideology that organizes difference and power, is always protean and sticky, attaching to a range of ideologies, narratives, and vocabularies in ways both familiar and strange.” ^[2]

Attending to the intersections of racialization with the discourses of rank, gender, religion, and ethnic heritage represented by Shakespeare anchors the work in the questions and affective experiences of our students’ lives, histories, and communities. Rooted in a commitment to collective freedom via the analysis of discourses of power from an embodied (as opposed to a purely cognitive) perspective,^[3] the study of racialization in Shakespeare—which is to say the historical production and power of whiteness via the representation of darkness^[4]—allows students to analyze historical, literary, and theoretical work that can profoundly inform their understanding of the context of their own lives. Far from diminishing their understanding of Shakespeare, students find a more complex, accessible, and thus rewarding experience of Shakespeare’s work and its utility beyond tests and standardized measures of achievement.

The use of critical race studies in the teaching of Shakespeare, however, requires teacher preparedness for potential difficulties because of the deeply embodied conversations and the unapologetic inquiries that can follow. As premodern scholar Adrienne Merritt argued at the 2021 RaceB4Race Education Conference, attending to premodern works unbound from an Anglo-American dream of sameness requires not only attention to the language and context of our texts but reflection on our motives for doing the work and an explicit articulation of our commitments.^[5] As Bettina L. Love demonstrates in We Want to Do More Than Survive, currently, “white men and women make up more than 80 percent of the teaching force” (29). The consequence of this fact is that our classrooms, for all students but especially students of color, are places in which white communal and educational norms are often painfully visible only to students of color. Making transparent our pedagogical motives and commitments and our reasons for putting them into practice with our students opens the door to a demystified Bard.

Establishing classroom procedures that support student learning and health should be requisite for any teacher. Yet analysis of racialization in the work and world of a writer long associated with a humanism in which differences of social power are obscured or erased requires careful consideration of how the commitments of our classroom communities resist complicity with such myths by building collaborative practices that support the lives and needs of all our students, especially those of color. These practices should hold us responsible for living in relation to each other with recognition, respect, care, and accountability. As Love and bell hooks remind us, reckoning with the history and impacts of racialization is deeply liberatory work for all but only if we see our classrooms as historical structures and a space in which to build anti-racist community. While grappling with how the literary construction of whiteness informs the discourses of rank, gender, religion, and ethnic heritage in Shakespeare’s work, students inevitably navigate the ways in which they have been taught to see embodied difference and the violence, suffering, and loss that normalizes a system in which one’s proximity to normative forms of being arbitrarily defines the value of one’s person, community, and consequent opportunities or ends. Explicit practices that support the learning and conversation entailed by exploring a Shakespeare in which the construction of whiteness—and the Black, Jewish, Indigenous, and Muslim lives upon which it depends—make space for all students to reckon with the complex relations between social and literary norms, historical perspectives, embodied experience, and Shakespeare’s value for their own learning and educational lives.

What does such a classroom require? Certainly, the belief in the beauty and power of all students and the diverse bodies and communities they live in. But more practically, an anti-racist classroom requires a respect for and commitment to learning about the lives, histories, and work of those long marginalized in histories of Anglo-American culture; a rejection of shaming self or others; and a commitment to accountability to the work and each other. When studying racialization in Shakespeare, students and teachers benefit from clear commitments that normalize the discomfort of not knowing, and the vulnerability and courage that make learning and creativity possible. As adrienne maree brown explains, “Interdependence requires being seen, as much as possible, as your true self,” “accepting our inner multitudes” or what can look like contradictions, recognizing “that where you are wrong might be the most fertile ground” for connection, and being able to “ask for and receive what you need.”^[6]

While community building in any classroom is important, such work is especially so when undertaking reading, writing, and conversing about the nature of racialized power in the work of a cultural icon like Shakespeare. Indeed, the failure to acknowledge the nature of the work the class will do, what it requires of its members, and the practices that will support our collaborations and the risks we take alone and together is likely to, at best, limit student engagement and, at worst, do emotional and intellectual harm to students—especially those of color—and to the classroom collective upon which we all rely.^[7]

Teachers, much like students and cohorts, are distinct. Our gifts for connection, elucidation, and the development of trustworthy, just, and effective practices that nurture student growth and community necessarily vary and depend on our embodied life experiences in a school system in which the majority of our students’ teachers have been white. If, as Ian Smith argued at the 2021 RaceB4 Race Education Conference, teaching effectively requires openness to learning about and reflecting on our weaknesses, white teachers must reckon with the institutional violence endured by people of color in surviving an overwhelmingly white educational complex.^[8] Consequently, please take what’s useful in the practices I offer below and revise or set aside the rest, given your embodied identities and the communities and histories that make up your classroom community and institutional history. I am an older, able-bodied cis white woman who teaches students who overwhelmingly come from segregated communities in a “blue” state and city created via settler colonization, Indigenous dispossession, racial expulsion, antiblackness, and Latinx labor exploitation, the legacies of which continue to structure our communities and university. Teaching Shakespeare embedded in this history by reckoning with the representation of whiteness, misogyny, and ethnic and religious hatred he often deploys—even as we reckon with the beauty and power of his depictions of human vulnerability—may be both triggering and transformative. How I invite my students to imagine and practice the work of classroom community is determinative.

On day one, I explain that communities committed to learning with and from each other benefit from a commitment to practices that support learning. I walk through why I think these commitments help us attend to our own (and our community’s) embodied experience and will be useful to us as we work together. These commitments, drawn originally from the work of Caprice Hollins and Ilsa Govan, become a kind of touchstone and basis of inquiry, informing my facilitation of the class, my students’ group work and written collaboration, and the tone and substance of all of our responses to each other. Perhaps the most important thing I say is that these commitments are to practices, aptly named because, given the legacies we’ve inherited, these behaviors are hard to sustain, for everyone. As Angela Davis says, “Freedom is a constant struggle.” But every day is a new day and showing up with the following in mind helps us all engage and learn from each other, and the work of Shakespeare, thoughtfully and respectfully.

Our Practices

1. Stay Engaged. Stay with the topic. If you feel the need to change the topic to make yourself feel more comfortable, or find yourself drifting from our discussion, take time to investigate the source of the feeling or disengagement. Be a student of your own learning process.
2. Listen for understanding, not response. Stay curious about others’ perspectives, the text, and the contexts from which both arise. Think about what you want to say before speaking and consider how it will move us toward a greater understanding of the issue at hand.
3. Speak from your own experience, never those of others, and avoid generalizations about other people. Avoid comparing your personal experience with that of others or rationalizing or justifying—as opposed to explaining—your position.
4. If you believe you or others have said something harmful, resist shaming. Instead seek accountability by articulating impact or, as the case may be, an understanding of impact (not intent) and offer an apology. Shame shuts down learning by declaring our essential selves (rather than our actions) fundamentally unworthy of respect. Apologizing for the harm experienced (impact) demonstrates accountability and compassion, crucial features of human connection in strong communities.
5. Observe the lean-in and lean-back rules: If you’ve spoken a lot, try to lean back and make space for others—even if that means some silence. If you’ve rarely or never spoken, lean in and aim to contribute regularly—whether that’s once a class or once a week.
6. Expect and accept non-closure. Given our focus on Shakespeare’s work and world—at once distant from yet connected to our own—and a writer whose reputation more than likely precedes and may inhibit our experience of his work—there may be times when you feel a lack of closure in your understanding of the material, our discussion, or your relation to another person in the class. Trust the process. Take risks and be kind to yourself. Struggle is a part of powerful learning.
7. Use (Y)Our Resources. Just as I prepare to be with you, you should prepare to be with all of us. Beyond doing the reading, that might mean looking things up and researching answers to basic questions outside of class. It might mean checking in with me, or me with you, if we are feeling some disconnection. Let’s step up to the challenges and own our education (teachers are constantly learning, too, especially from their students). Ask for the support we need. If we can’t provide it, we will work to help you find it elsewhere.

These practices are, if not entirely new, strangely explicit for many students. Some classes ask to post them in our room as a visual reminder. Yet as we work together, their small iterations demonstrate how meaningful and thus useful they can become in helping students connect with others in the collaborative work of studying, responding to, and even adapting the work and lives we read, including each other’s. Perhaps the most immediate benefits of these practices are increased student comfort with silence for thinking, students’ capacity to make space for others’ voices and experiences, and students’ willingness to offer inquisitive and exploratory rather than rhetorical remarks. The classroom as a competitive environment for intellectual or performative superiority is deeply related to its history as a bastion of white (patriarchal) privilege in higher education and the racialized public-school system.^[9] These commitments help destabilize the assumed value of being “right” rather than curious and/or resistant, the latter of which may signify intuitive forms of insight and adaptive strength.

Reflecting on who my students see when I walk into a Shakespeare class is a foundation of my relation to these practices. As a Black male colleague of mine explained about teaching Shakespeare, “I explode all their expectations about who has the cultural and intellectual authority to teach, study, or perform Shakespeare.” As a white woman, I do not. Consequently. I work to destabilize my normative power in the classroom as the presumed guardian of Shakespeare. One of the ways I do so is to precede all dialogues with small-group active listening, round-robin responses to text-based questions, followed by an open discussion in which anyone can recognize important or harmful comments or return to essential questions.^[10] In these exchanges, I look for space to share that I first found meaning in Shakespeare’s work in a movie theater, not in my undergrad Shakespeare course; that I learned about racial caste in the communities in which I was born (Chicago) and raised (Seattle); and that, as a child, I felt the disjunction between my parents’ liberal commitment to civil rights, desegregation in schools, housing, and healthcare, and the reality of how they lived and with whom—a disjunction that took years of study and work to see as white privilege. The point of such a sharing is not to center my experience but to acknowledge that reckoning with how our lives are implicated in the art we experience and are taught, and how we learn to think about our relations to others (if at all), is ongoing, and antiracist work makes connection and collaboration possible. As Sonya Renee Taylor explains, “Not knowing is an opportunity for exploration without judgment or demands” even as we remain “clear that people’s bodies are not the cause of our [or our ancestors’] social maladies.”^[11]

A key event in establishing the connections that build students’ trust in me as the convener is modeling the respect and curiosity about them that I ask them to offer each other. Two early practices display this to them. The first is a request that they share with me their hopes and fears about studying Shakespeare (anonymously or not, as they like). I share the themes of their remarks with the class, demonstrating that I take them seriously and that they share many of the same fears and hopes. Then I suggest the ways in which I have structured the class to abate some of those fears and realize their hopes: We’ll go slowly and deep rather than quickly and wide in our reading of Shakespeare, historical documents, and supplementary reading; we’ll see Shakespeare performed (on film) and in adaptations and appropriations of his work by people of color; I’ll introduce them to the conventions Shakespeare works from and adapts, the better to situate themselves relative to those recognizable and yet archaic forms of drama and ideology; and I’ll offer them summaries of the plots to enable their focus not on what is happening but rather how Shakespeare represents it. I assure them that while we can work to hold each other accountable for the facts of the texts we read—its words and events—the work of interpretation and response is inevitably rooted in our own embodied responses to Shakespeare, which can change over a lifetime as we learn and change ourselves.

In all these ways, I hope to be transparent and accountable. But I also ask much of them in the deeply collaborative nature of our learning community: the regular prompted small-group discussion beginning with deep active listening to each member that I mentioned earlier; weekly independent but structured responses; regular, positive peer responses to independent work; and the use of exit surveys and midstream unit/class evaluations in which students detail what they find most useful, what’s getting in their way, how they would assess their own role in the class, and what if anything they would do differently. Finally, I conduct brief ten-to-fifteen-minute required conferences early on in which I ask them three questions: “Tell me about yourself”; “Tell me about one of your most powerful learning experiences, in or outside the classroom”; and “Tell me about how you best receive feedback on your work.” With these three questions, I quickly learn what they value in themselves and how learning has become meaningful or alienating to them. I use my notes on their answers to structure my responses to their work, to draw on my knowledge of what’s important to them, to encourage their strengths, and to help them trust the process of exploring their embodied relation to Shakespeare’s work.

The practices I’ve outlined are rooted in several fundamental commitments that exceed the classroom while informing my pedagogy within it: Work for justice; be brave; be kind; listen; move toward and serve the learner; be trustworthy and accountable; communicate with care and clarity; remember that collaboration creates community; admit and apologize for your errors easily; and stay positive. All these commitments derive from the recognition of our shared human vulnerability to pain, suffering, and loss, and thus to the opportunity for doing work together that draws on our individual and cultural experience and strengths to resist, as Eve Tuck and K. Wang Yang suggest, a politics of thought in which violence is the norm. Instead, “We might conceive of forms of relationality in which new modes of human-ness might be possible.”^[12]

Creating an anti-racist Shakespeare-classroom community is challenging and rewarding work. When students are freed from the dominant norms of educational prowess as superiority over others and given the means of building embodied learning communities in which the impact of racialized language, action, and representation rather than disembodied intention are studied and engaged, they find a depth of intellectual and expressive creativity that is, as Kim F. Hall hoped, rigorous, historical, sensitive and thus, in the original sense of liberal, a source of freedom.

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brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategies: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.

Dyer, Richard. White. 1997. Reprint. London, New York: Routledge, 2017. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Erickson, Peter, and Kim F. Hall. “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race.” Shakespeare Quarterly, 67, no. 1, (2016), pp. 1–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24778667

Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1995.

Hollins, Caprice, and Ilsa Govan. Diversity Equity and Inclusion: Strategies for Facilitating Conversations on Race. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Lanham, MD: Bold Type Books, 2016.

Love, Bettina L. We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Boston: Beacon Press, 2019.

———. “White Teachers Need Anti-Racist Therapy.” EducationWeek. February 6, 2020. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-white-teachers-need-anti-racist-therapy/2020/02.

Metzger, Mary Janell. Shakespeare Without Fear: Teaching for Understanding. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004.

Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. New York : W.W. Norton, 2010.

Smith, Ian, and Adrienne Merritt. “RaceB4Race Education Day 1: Ian Smith and Adrienne Merritt.” With opening remarks by Ayanna Thompson and with Q&A moderated by Kim F. Hall. RaceB4Race (RB4R) Conference, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Panel streamed January 25, 2021. YouTube video. https://youtu.be/bOR_pXYxYMU?si=7gZM5o03AoNRRxui.

Taylor, Sonya Renee. The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love. Oakland, CA : Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wang Yang. Toward What Justice?: Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.

Williams, Patricia J. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.