Conventional K–12 approaches to Shakespeare and other pre-/early modern texts frequently render race invisible and gender, religious affiliation, and immigration status—and intersections among such minoritized identity markers—invisible or uncomplicated. We offer a framework of design and inquiry that aims to challenge, trouble, and interrogate such approaches. Our framework draws upon research and practice we conducted for several years through the Center for Shakespeare in Diverse Classrooms at the University of California, Davis (hereafter, “the Center”). We conducted this work in collaboration with leaders and practitioners of Globe Education, Shakespeare’s Globe, London. This partnership created immersive, inquiry-based, and sustained experiences for teachers using drama-based practices as a means to engage with texts and unveil possibilities for critical exploration (Athanases & Sanchez, 2020a). This chapter draws upon projects and insights from this work, informed by additional collaborators in California and London, including early career teachers, teacher mentors, teacher educators, and Shakespeare scholars. We also place that work in conversation with RaceB4Race (RB4R) scholarship to provide tools and practical ideas for teachers aiming to infuse Shakespeare and other pre-/early modern works into their curricula and inquire into what unfolds in culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse classrooms.

The framework of design and inquiry we offer draws upon scholarship in teaching and learning to guide ways educators can extend the scholarship of RB4R in meaningful and accessible ways for K–12 classrooms and teacher education programs. The work of RB4R scholarship centers race as the central construct of interest. We add attention to other identity labels, which add critical perspectives on the identities in and social contexts of Shakespeare’s work and other pre-/early modern texts. Engaging students in explorations into identity and social contexts requires deliberate instructional design, coupled with the capacity to adapt as students shape outcomes. We offer design features, illustrated by our research and practice, with practical considerations for the realities of teachers’ often crowded, mandated curricula.

Our work is informed by calls from RB4R scholars to problematize Shakespeare’s depictions of identity markers (such as race, gender, and religion), which are often treated as inconvenient truths that get in the way of appreciating Shakespeare’s genius. Rather, we position these moments as rich opportunities for developing students’ critical awareness of how such identity markers are constructed. This notion moves past the common framing of Shakespeare as a monumental genius whose works are universally relevant. RB4R scholarship makes clear that notions of relevance—and even the recontextualization of Shakespeare’s works to different, often contemporary social contexts—can be fraught with complications. Teachers’ instruction can promote problematic depictions when Shakespeare is taught without troubling the assumption that the value of his works rests on their relevance due to the universal “human experience” often assigned to Shakespeare’s works and themes (Smith, 2021). As several RB4R-affiliated scholars have articulated, an emphasis on relevance undermines students’ experiences and places further unnecessary focus on Shakespeare’s relatability (Ndiaye, 2021). The press toward relatability and universality can send the message that the texts are fixed—even texts as scripture (Scholes, 1985)—obscuring opportunities to explore and critique tensions and themes depicted.

Our framework is grounded in the notion that students need opportunities to question and critique social issues that arise when studying Shakespeare’s work. Shakespeare’s texts provide opportunities for such critique and can be rich grounds for students to examine social issues in different contexts, provided teachers share this conception and have resources, models, and classroom-tested examples to guide such critical examination. Some of this work can be accomplished by historicizing social issues prevalent in Shakespeare’s works for learners to understand the work in time and space. Also, the work can be strengthened by adding intertextual connections for learners to critically engage with Shakespeare’s work, drawing upon scholarship from various fields, contemporary social issues, and practice-based explorations.

A Framework for Exploring RB4R Ideas in K–12 Practice

Our framework includes four dimensions distilled from our multi-year research and development program at the Center, supported by research on teaching, teacher learning, and classroom instruction. These dimensions are (a) embodiment through drama-based pedagogy; (b) interdisciplinary dialogue and collaborative design; (c) inquiry and sustained reflection; and (d) adaptive practice. The inquiry work of K–12 teachers is central to this framework for deepening attention to RB4R-inspired work.

Embodiment through Drama-Based Pedagogy

Foundational to our framework is embodied activity. Through movement, creative play, enactments of texts and stories, the voicing of language, and the staging of points of conflict, teachers and students engage with classroom texts in open-ended, inventive ways. Drama-based pedagogy (DBP) frames such activity as dynamic classroom practices for student engagement in exploratory, reflective literacy work across disciplines, without the intent to formally perform them as theater-type activities (Dawson & Lee, 2018).

Teachers in our projects have utilized many DBP practices that involve students in embodying texts as learning opportunities to contextualize a play, scaffold meaning-making, and promote intertextual discoveries. Such engagement benefits from enactment as a process of discovery and learning, and as a means to engage learners in social justice and anti-racist work (Gallagher et al., 2013; Ntelioglou, 2011). DBP enables opportunities to feel and think one’s way into stories, history, and conflicts that warrant interrogation. Education and literature scholars have documented how using drama and performance enables learners to embody character actions and feelings, potentially leading to empathy, perspective-taking, sociopolitical awareness, and the recognition of social inequality (Athanases & Sanchez, 2020a; Enciso et al., 2016). Socioemotional skills are necessary for community building in any classroom, especially in a time when our societies are so divided and there is anti anti-racist rhetoric in the media and other spaces youth navigate.

For example, to explore character conflict and differential social status among characters (common in Shakespeare’s works), learners can enact and physically explore these rather abstract concepts. Through embodied practices, meaning may be deepened as it moves from one text or medium to the next, leading to more robust, contextually situated engagements with Shakespeare’s work (Houk, in this volume). This process of transmediation benefits from inquiry (developed in Houk’s chapter) because discussion and reflection are needed to grapple with inherent intertextual ambiguity in moving across media (McCormick, 2011).

Natalie,^[1] an eighth-grade English language arts (ELA) teacher, used multiple embodied activities where students played with power relations to attune them to ways characters’ disparate statuses impact their behavior and interactions, a common feature in Shakespeare and other literature. One such activity is Status Cards, where students are dealt a card from a standard playing deck, which they do not look at but hold face outward to their forehead as they walk around the room (Banks, 2016). The card’s value determines their “status” (ace the lowest), and students interact with one another to guess their own place in a status hierarchy by how (un)deferential their classmates are towards them, before debriefing and reflecting on the activity as a class. Natalie found activities like this valuable when coupled with debriefing:

Students were able to hear the reasonings of their peers, as well as embody the characters they were studying. This deepened their understanding and provided them a way to learn through “knowledge-in-action” (Applebee, 1996) rather than having to regurgitate information that I gave them about my opinion of character motivation and the central idea of a text.

Here Natalie reports and reflects on how embodied activities enabled students to participate in co-creating knowledge about specific characters, aided by hearing other students’ thoughts. Students used subtextual clues to make interpretive claims about character motivation, which they embodied in class. Natalie highlights how embodied activities can help students attend to subtle details in a text and explore the impacts of those details with peers. Embodied practices also aid students in developing a sense of agency and authority over their engagement with classroom texts and learning. The meanings behind character status and within character relationships were made clear for students in personal and communal ways.

Brooke, a sixth-grade teacher working in a predominantly Latinx community near the California/Mexico border, likewise reported the power of DBP for her learners:

I am at a Title 1 school with a lot of struggling learners. Or perhaps I should say that the teachers struggle to teach to the students’ strengths. I’ve found that many of these students’ best modality is kinesthetic. They light up when we put drama-based practices into play. It showcases their learning in a way that writing alone can’t. Likewise, their engagement increases and when engagement increases, deeper learning occurs. Drama-based strategies also allow students to see texts and characters in many different lights, increasing comprehension and empathy.

The embodied, kinesthetic nature of DBP is the baseline for the work of teachers in our projects. As they enact scenes and characters, students feel their way into issues and conflicts, in a manner that holds the potential to become the “knowledge-in-action” (Applebee, 1996) that Natalie referenced.

Interdisciplinary Dialogue and Collaborative Design

The second dimension of our framework is a vision of partnership in which scholars, K–12 teachers, teacher educators, and professional development leaders dialogue about relevant themes and twenty-first-century concerns, and design meaningful instructional units and lessons aimed toward K–12 students’ expansive collective learning (Sanchez, 2022).

Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Such partnerships add historicizing to texts and events, often in an interdisciplinary manner. By interdisciplinary, we mean ways in which scholars and educators may cross disciplinary boundaries to link ideas from distinct theoretical and conceptual frameworks to K–12 subject-matter study. Teacher leaders and teachers of distinct subject matter foci also draw upon curricular concepts specific to their curriculum but work to illuminate new interdisciplinary understandings that often add critical perspectives.

Such an interdisciplinary approach can be realized through pairings of Shakespeare with primary sources from history/social studies, engaging learners with resources that extend, complicate, and “talk back” to textual moments. These interdisciplinary approaches often support textual study common in ELA classrooms, including characterization (direct and indirect), thematic understanding, and intertextual linking (explored in chapters of this volume). For example, Ferdinand (middle school, social studies) used DBP activities to enact scenes from Othello to explore character, themes, and race. He then used Abigail Adams’s letter to William Stephens Smith in which the first lady remarks how her “whole soul shuderd” at the thought of a Black person touching “fair Desdemona” (Adams, 1785), unable to engage with the character’s race/skin color despite the eloquence with which Othello (and the actor, likely in blackface) defends himself against Brabantio. Ferdinand prompted students to reflect on this, including who they most imagined Adams thought should be included as citizens along with white men:

I chose students to read aloud their response. Most students determined Adams would probably consider white women as deserving of political equality, while being more apprehensive of allowing political franchise for Americans of African descent.

Tapping historical sources can support critical conversations and reflective writings that invite students to examine and problematize how the racial identity of a character has been treated and discussed in a specific historical context. Such a process, informed by primary sources, provides opportunities for students to move past “receiving wisdom” to a process of creating knowledge.

Other social studies/history teachers also used literature and DBP as resources for engaging with history. Edward (seventh grade) introduced scenes and excerpts from various Shakespeare plays—paired with DBP practices—making explicit links to historical primary source documents. For example, he explored with students some issues of power, violence, and assassination in briefly enacted scenes from Julius Caesar. He then drew linkages about power and sociopolitical domination to Hernán Cortés’s second letter to King Charles V of Spain (Anghiera et al., 1524), where students identified themes of death, murder, and violence inflicted on Natives by the conquistadors.

Other history teachers used a DBP practice called Hot Seat to raise critical questions about history, using documents and perspectives from various fields. Hot Seat positions one student at a time in character fielding critical questions from classmates. During a study of the Second Industrial Revolution, Nell (eleventh-grade US history) used this activity to explore multiple and conflicting perspectives of “historical figures like Andrew Carnegie” that could help identify him “either as a Captain of Industry or a Robber Baron.” Another teacher, Ivy (tenth-grade world history), used Hot Seat with excerpts from Shakespeare’s Richard III. She encouraged students to use questioning to unpack how Richard is depicted in the play: ultimately as a deformed, subhuman villain who does not deserve power. Ivy used the play and drama practice to “help students analyze how bias can influence the presentation of history” and asked how the play could serve as propaganda to enhance “the prosperity of the [Tudor] monarchy [and] discourage negative portrayals of them.” The class used the play as a historical primary document to interrogate how literature could serve the ends of the Tudor monarchy at the expense of obscuring history.

Fostering discussions about past racial constructions and racism in relation to a play or an historical event can invite conversations with learners about race and racism today, as well as help students develop critical awareness to engage in these discussions. These intertextual linkages have been fruitful in work we have conducted with teachers. Print and media resources hold possibilities for illustrating, expanding, and troubling texts and themes. RB4R scholars point to examples that can add texture and critical perspectives to texts. Such “usable scholarship” and multimodal explorations for classrooms include clickable online resources that infuse critical perspectives and encourage dialogue. While reading a play, planning lessons, or exploring an act or scene, several kinds of links are available. For example, an RB4R scholar may offer a four-to-five-minute videotaped or audiotaped user-friendly critique of a scene or representation of a character or conflict, raising critical questions that teachers and students can take up in their classroom. Remarks from the scholar might introduce historical considerations and raise questions about identities and stories needing additional treatment and perspective. Such activity can help move scholars’ work into the orbit of teachers’ attention, collapsing a divide between academic and K–12 work.

Collaborative Design

Interdisciplinary dialogue can be promoted in the context of curriculum design, where teachers pool ideas as they tap their pedagogical knowledge and knowledge of students. Teachers in our projects have voiced a need for a professional community to support this work. Partnering with other teachers is ideal—even (or perhaps especially) across subjects, grade levels, and schools—as teachers can share expertise, assume creative leadership roles, and engage in opportunities for professional growth with peers. In our program of research and professional development, design work benefits from teachers sequencing activities for enhanced learning and generating prompts to invite reflection on activities as they play out in a unit. Of particular value to students are opportunities for texts and resources to dialogue with each other across time and space, supported by tasks that foster students’ development of intertextual exploration. Intertextual resources include contemporary texts and stories that share links to themes in Shakespeare’s works (see Sanchez and Kiikvee, this volume) and topics of interest for learners, which may facilitate students’ connection to and critical engagement with such themes and topics.

In work conducted at the Center, we exercised collaborative design in workshops and summer institutes that included design work among teachers across subjects and grades. In one three-day summer institute for new teachers, we drew on literature studies and the sociopolitical framing of cultural events to explore themes from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, to dialogue about themes, and to design a series of lessons for use in culturally and linguistically diverse K–12 classrooms. Prompted by a resource workshop led by a campus librarian with expertise in history and cultural studies, teachers worked to include multicultural perspectives on text and multimodal engagements, resulting in the institute called A Caesar for Our Time (Athanases & Sanchez, 2020a). This title arose from a collective concern that themes of patriotism and power in Caesar needed critical exploration among learners. In addition, the group felt a need to address a differential treatment the play had received in the media when it was performed during the Obama and Trump presidencies, depicted in news accounts we presented to teachers. We discussed how conservative news outlets expressed outrage when a Trump-like Caesar was assassinated during New York City’s annual Shakespeare in the Park program in 2017 but had praised a 2012 production by The Acting Company in which an Obama-like Caesar was assassinated.

At this institute, we divided teachers into groups by a thematic unit they were interested in rather than by their specific teaching contexts, ensuring that teachers participated in unit design with colleagues from other disciplines and grade levels. For each thematic unit, groups selected resources from the internet, made direct connections to required curricula, and developed discussion questions that would lead students to unpack themes and make new meanings. To illustrate each theme and provide discussion material, teachers selected relevant, unabridged excerpts from Caesar. Each thematic unit followed the same template/structure for design, enabling teachers to navigate other themes in their peers’ designs. To make the teaching of these units plausible within often crowded curricula, we agreed on a structure of mini-units or learning modules anchored in Shakespeare and focused on themes. The units included one-to-two weeks of lessons to be embedded within the first month of the school year, with follow-up workshops planned for teachers to report on students’ responses to lessons. For example, one group of elementary-school teachers and high-school social studies teachers together focused on the theme of patriotism, including examining Brutus’s and Antony’s speeches to the populace debating purposes for Caesar’s assassination.

For another three-day institute, five Center-affiliated teachers assumed lead roles and designers and facilitators of the institute. The group led new teachers’ design of thematic mini-units exploring Othello and Twelfth Night, exploring themes of race and gender identities. Fundamental to our notion of design is the imperative that classroom work be guided by both conceptual and practical tools (Grossman et al., 1999). Conceptual tools provide ways of thinking and guiding teacher and student learning across multiple contexts of use, drawing on a multitude of resources. Across contexts, practical tools help enact concepts in practice through an expanded array of design templates and other tools. The latter may include guides to unpack challenging texts, track character arcs, or explore themes of power and the social construction of identities—all aligned with literacy standards and ready to be tested in, and shaped by, real classrooms inhabited by real learners.

Inquiry and Sustained Reflection

The third dimension of our practice-informed framework is inquiry and sustained reflection for teachers, students, and design partners. By inquiry, we mean ongoing personal and critical question-posing by students and data-based documentation of practice by teachers. Data from practice includes notes on observations of students’ interactions, student informal post-instruction reflections and formal synthesizing writings, and students’ responses to surveys and brief focal student interviews. Because of the centrality of inquiry in this work, with reflection embedded throughout, we identify how inquiry serves three distinct constituent groups.

Inquiry for K–12 Students

For K–12 students, relevant to our focus is drama inquiry (Edmiston, 2012), in which students ask questions of experience, examining what occurs during learning activities. Often in classrooms where DBP or other multimodal techniques are incorporated, moments of ephemeral activity are left behind instead of being interrogated for what they uncover. Our framework engages K–12 students in ongoing reflection on classroom practices and what they surface through multimodal records that may include discussion, journaling, visually representing thought processes, and essay writing.

For example, teachers with whom we have worked often prompt students to reflect on how they felt while enacting scenes and moments through drama-based activities, particularly when conflicts arise or characters’ differential social statuses become more than an abstraction but something embodied and felt. Two of our Center-affiliated teacher partners described student reflection prompts as practical tools that can be used across drama-based activities, including reflecting on purposes and processes while (a) planning enactments, (b) reflecting during the process of enactment (e.g., What are you feeling about scene and characters right now? Why?), and (c) debriefing in post-activity through spoken and written reflections on what arose (e.g., How were different groups or characters treated differently in the activity?) (Jasper et al., 2021).

Sawyer (ninth grade, ELA) described using student reflection to prompt perspective shifting. He worked at a school site that needed a perspective shift and DBP practices coupled with reflection could help with such change: “There has been a plethora of violence based on differences in cultural identity, and there has [sic] been specific acts of violence that have been committed with loyalty being the only catalyst (retaliatory violence).” He found that the use of DBP and accompanying debriefings helped:

It was interesting to use this lens in the interrogation of fictional characters, and to make relevant the idea that this is part of the power of literature—that the goal of much of the reading that we are doing is to get students to interrogate decision making of their world.

These types of activities invite students to think critically, explore meaning and connection in unbounded ways, and assist students’ critical perspective-taking, including consciousness-raising regarding racialized experiences.

Such work may require critiquing and raising questions about the white gaze (Mehdizadeh, 2021) or unsettling/decolonizing literary texts. This may include making use of digital media to interrogate workings of race and identity in modern adaptations of early modern drama, such as in Cahalan’s discussion (this volume) of Michael Radford’s filmed production of The Merchant of Venice. Cahalan’s chapter explores how YouTube clips can be used to juxtapose performance scenes for critical examination in the classroom. The unit design described in that chapter also includes guided questions aimed toward pushing students to examine how performances can construct race onstage and onscreen. Students also practice casting roles in their own imagined productions, developing analytic arguments about the meaning of such choices, and reflecting critically on their perceptions of race and identity in performance. By comparing the casting and costuming of minor characters in the Radford production, specifically Morocco, Arragon, and their attendants, Cahalan’s unit invites teachers to ask students to critique how the film constructs these characters’ races using a multimodal approach to examine the process of racialization.

Inquiry for Teachers

Central to our framework and our program of work is the sustained attention to teacher inquiry. Teachers at the Center enrolled in a series of four teacher inquiry courses that ran across their credential year to an optional MA/first year of teaching. This work involved continual question-posing, data collection, and guided data analysis, resulting in teacher reports and an MA-culminating symposium presentation. For both preservice and in-service teachers, we focused the teacher’s own inquiry and data collection on trends and themes emerging from practice, informed by research and practice literature. Teacher inquiry has been lauded as a useful process for teachers across the continuum of teacher learning—typically including systematic and intentional investigation into all matters of teaching, learning, and schooling (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) and often with attention to concerns of social justice (Fecho & Allen, 2003; Scherff, 2012). Data that a teacher may collect can include students’ reflections on themes, embodied activities, and emerging tensions; student surveys exploring what is recalled as meaningful and why; and a teacher’s own journaling and notes on classroom practice. These forms of classroom data flip the commonly assumed appropriate process of seeking evidence-based practice—instead seeking practice-based evidence of action and learning (McNamara, 2002).

Supported by our sustained development efforts, Center-affiliated teachers have engaged in these forms of inquiry in two contexts. First, many credential program graduates elected to join MA-year inquiry classes focused specifically on drama-based practice and inquiry, documenting and reporting from their uses of DBP. In one study we conducted at the Center, twenty-four teachers across grades and content areas reflected on what teacher inquiry revealed to them about using embodied, DBP, multimodal, innovative instructional techniques and designing for student learning. The result was an interactive three-tier model highlighting foundational literacies (e.g., engagement, affect, and creativity), core literacies (a second tier up, e.g., comprehension and thematic thinking), and critical literacies (a kind of pinnacle, e.g., perspective taking and empathy development) (Sanchez et al., 2022). That study also highlights that when teachers share classroom data, inquiry processes, and insights, knowledge and expertise can be distributed throughout the group. Such teacher-inquiry communities can lead to the co-designing of units and lesson plans, informed by collective teacher knowledge and practice.

Beyond the MA experience, Center-affiliated teachers have formed inquiry groups in our professional-development workshops and summer institutes (described above) as an intentional process of looking critically at student data. Teachers tracked and reported patterns in observations of student work and coded open-ended survey responses in order to cluster responses into bins of responses and ideas. As teachers explore new instructional work, they may find that following the pathway of data fosters pattern-finding in student learning, questions, and challenges (Athanases et al., 2015), a process for which teachers often need support (Korthagen, 2010). Our framework, therefore, explores the need for resource-sharing among teachers as they explore new curriculum and instruction that address gender and race in pre-/early modern texts, including Shakespeare’s works, challenging conventional, historically decontextualized approaches.

Inquiry for Scholars and the Collective

As scholars engage with K–12 teachers, opportunities arise to explore how ideas get taken up, what new discoveries emerge, and what challenges and tensions persist from the work. Among such foci are those informed by questions such as these that we have explored in our work at the Center:

• How do teachers respond to, adopt, or adapt relevant designs for use in diverse classrooms?
• What do student and teacher reflections reveal about how Shakespeare’s work or other pre-/early modern texts influence ideas about race, gender, sexuality, or social issues?
• In what ways, and to what degree, do students engage with or extend project designs?
• How do teacher educators respond to/adopt/adapt drama and literature-based approaches to teacher-education curricula that are informed by relevant scholarship and practice?
• In what ways can scholarship be made more applicable and accessible to K–12 classrooms?

As a collective, we researchers and teacher-inquirers have expanded our knowledge of what can be possible when inquiry gets reported and shapes practice, inviting multiple voices and experiences to be considered.

In addition, scholars and teachers alike may benefit from increased inquiry opportunities. New scholars from humanities programs seldom have opportunities to partner with teachers who are engaged in trying out ideas in classroom practice. In many humanities and social science PhD programs, teacher preparation is not very standardized, varying across institutions. A scholar’s future work as an educator is often not given priority in their PhD training. Scholars can benefit from opportunities to practice and study teacher inquiry to enrich their own pedagogical practice. Teachers’ classroom practice can also benefit from additional connections between scholars and teachers. Literary scholarship, for instance, is usually only marginally connected to ELA classroom work, often confined to a short essay included in a course text or glossary notes that may or may not be read in class. ELA teachers wanting to draw on literary scholarship in their practice may be overwhelmed or unsure of where to begin. Teacher inquiry into such incorporation of scholarship to practice may aid in enriching practice.

Inquiry in our framework is multi-leveled. Academic/scholar partners may participate meaningfully in formal or informal inquiry with K–12 teachers and their students about emerging discoveries and values through a unit as enacted, as well as questions, challenges, and tensions that emerge. Inquiry for K–12 students, teachers, and academic partners is a process of using findings and themes to rethink, refine, and redirect design for future iterations of engagement. In this way, our framework aligns in part with Freire’s (1998) notion of praxis as critical practice informed by ongoing cycles of action, reflection, and inquiry.

Adaptive Practice

The final dimension of our framework is the principle that effective teachers are adaptive problem-solvers as challenges arise (Bransford et al., 2005; Parsons et al., 2018). Despite designs for learning, a teacher using DBP practices and facilitating critical conversations about race and diverse identities likely needs to be nimble in classroom practice and adaptive as sensitive moments arise. Teachers have reported this need when embodied play feels real.

Jerónimo, a tenth-grade world history teacher, described how during the implementation of his mini-unit on status, the DBP Status Card activity described earlier created a strong emotional response from one of his “cheeriest students.” Jerónimo reported:

Knowing the DBP lessons can be emotionally draining, I prefaced the status card game by having students repeat after me, “This is a game. This is pretend. I will have fun.” Despite my reassurances that status cards weren’t “real,” I had a student break down after being treated like a “2” [lowest in this iteration] which was the card he had randomly been given.

Jerónimo needed to adapt in the moment:

The DBP strategies had to stop and I led my classroom community in a community circle to debrief the activity and the feelings it brought up. We also used the time to validate and welcome the student, who was crying under a table, back into our community.

Another example of adaptive teaching emerged during Betty’s tryout of the mini-unit she and teacher colleagues designed in the summer institute A Caesar for Our Time, focused on the theme of patriotism in the context of Julius Caesar. During a discussion of the Antony/Brutus opposing speeches to the populace in her fifth-grade, multiple-subjects class, students explored what it means to be patriotic. Two Latinx male students described how patriotism can be extreme and can lead to discriminatory events (Athanases & Sanchez, 2020b). One of them explained how someone in the US may show their patriotism by displaying flags and bumper stickers with war/gun motifs/themes. The second student immediately added that once, while driving with his dad, someone spewed from their truck adorned with “patriotic” stickers: “Go back to your country!” Betty used this as an opening to reflect on how such “extreme patriotism” perpetuates racism, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and harm. Rather than exhibiting reverence for a famous play, Betty engaged in adaptive practice in the moment, as the class used Caesar as an inroad for engaging critically with their own experiences of patriotism. However, such reflection can risk falling back on ideas of Shakespeare as universally relevant, so responsible teaching also necessitates that students reflect on the distinct and varied ways in which patriotism can be problematic, resisting the urge to equate patriotism in Caesar with patriotism in the twenty-first-century US.

Jess, a seventh-grade ELA teacher working in a class of 70% students of color, mostly Latinx, provides another example of adaptive practice. Jess had students enact in pairs the Julius Caesar scene where Portia confronts Brutus about his recent erratic behavior and sickly appearance (Act Two, scene one). In the scene, and despite Portia’s appeals, Brutus refuses to reveal his plans to murder Caesar. After enactments, Jess asked students to think about their choices for enactment (using their bodies and voices) and about what their portrayal indicated about the characters’ actions and feelings. Things got emotional when those playing the role of Portia felt disrespected. Jess asked students to rewrite the scene using re-storying, a concept from one of the Center’s summer institutes, where students reshape narratives to include other voices and perspectives and to repair harm (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). Jess asked, “How can we re-story the scene to be more productive, respectful, communicative?” (Athanases & Sanchez, 2020b, p. 12). Reflecting on “a big bullying problem at school,” Jess found her students needed opportunities to explore empathy at a personal level as support for engaging in historical empathy. Such character interaction work might lead to more expansive student inquiry considerations, exemplified by a prompt she and a teacher partner constructed: “What did the scene reveal about social order in the text, author’s choices, or theme?” (Jasper et al., 2021).

In these examples, teachers’ adaptive practices were thoughtful, improvised, and varied. These practices included post-activity debriefing and emotional repair after exploring social status with tenth graders (Jerónimo); following the lead of fifth-grade student reports of harmful experiences with racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric, and students’ critical reflections on “extreme patriotism” (Betty); and re-storying after seventh-grade students enacting Portia in dialogue felt disrespected (Jess). In these illustrative cases, teachers were closely attuned to what DBP practices did or might do as students in their racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse classes took up the challenging work of interrogating conflicts and minoritized identities, prompted by scenes from Shakespeare or related texts and issues.

Even with design, commitment, and adaptive expertise, however, a teacher engaging with this work may get shut down by administrators. Brooke, the sixth-grade teacher (working near the California/Mexico border referenced earlier) who valued how DBP supported her learners, reported such an outcome. She had just completed one lesson from a unit co-constructed with other Center-affiliated teachers that explored perceptions of gender in the study of Twelfth Night. A handful of students in her class self-identified as non-binary or knew someone who did. She had shared her plans with her sixth-grade team of teachers, and someone relayed the plans to her principal. Brooke reported that her principal forced her to end the unit after only completing the first lesson out of a concern that parents in a predominantly Latinx community, described by the principal as “so conservative,” might take issue with a unit examining gender fluidity and identity. In this case, the principal’s essentializing of this community put an end to the unit. Brooke expressed disappointment, as her students were so engaged in the lesson: “I was really excited to teach lessons so relevant and meaningful to my group of kiddos but ultimately my hands were tied so I had to stop.” Brooke shared this outcome with teachers and leaders of our Center team. This event highlights the need for collective work to co-construct units, to prepare for obstructions that even adaptive practice cannot repair, such as a principal stereotyping parents in a community, as well as the need to debrief with like-minded colleagues who can envision ways to proactively address such concerns.

Innovative Practice to Address Constraints within K–12 Curricula

To foster and investigate practices, we propose instantiating the framework principles described above in instructional units that enable innovation within institutional constraints (Hammerness et al., 2005). Many teachers do not have the opportunities or freedom to design entire units from the ground up. For that reason, we have used modules or mini-units—and instructional adaptations informing them—that can be taught as an intact lesson series, as individual lessons that help frame or extend the teaching of a Shakespeare play, or as lessons structured with unifying links but taught over time. In addition, Sanchez and Kiikvee (this volume) model how scholars and teachers can partner to design and seed relevant work in primary-grade lessons and mini-units as part of a spiral curriculum up through high school.

In our conception, each mini-unit or module includes some of the following: a thematic/conceptual focus that invokes critical perspectives on race, gender, or other identity markers in texts; primary sources that historicize and challenge sections of texts; intertextual conversations: centering voices of people of color doing intertextual work; and perspective-taking (characterization, narration, point of view) to consider whose stories are being told and whose are omitted. Finally, across several strands of our work with teachers, we have structured engagement with what we call a democracy of resources, including print and online scholarship, standards documents, and observations of and insights from regional educators and K–12 students (Sanchez & Athanases, 2023).

Such a diverse body of human resources could include RB4R scholars, teachers, performance artists, and local K–12 students. Educators might explore links to spoken or written statements or short resources that report from tryouts of these kinds of activities and offer both positive outcomes and critical questions about what unfolded in practice and what needs attention in future work. In addition to critical content-focused infusion, this framework embeds RB4R scholarship into a resource-rich learning space to help teachers access these scholars’ work for use in secondary English and, as our project has illustrated, in classes across subject areas and across the gradespan. This process has the potential to collapse the divide between academic inquiry and K–12 classroom-based work, while enriching both. This collective process, informed by the framework we have described in this chapter, may serve as a heuristic for others in advancing engaging, multicultural, and critical treatment of texts that warrant reinvigorated attention.

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