In July of 2009, Chimamanda Adichie delivered a TED Talk warning against “the danger of a single story,” or monolithic readings of peoples and places.^[1] Adichie draws from personal experience to note a difference among circles of English-language readers. In her example, an American reader (a university student attending her guest lecture) extracts the idea that all Nigerian men are abusers because her novel takes place in Nigeria. Whereas this interpretation makes sense to an American underread in Nigerian literature, a Nigerian reader such as herself understands the folly. Would one assume all young Americans to be serial killers upon reading Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho as the antihero bathes in blood? Americans tend to base their entire impression of the vast African continent on one story taking place in one country in Africa; non-Americans gather impressions of one country (America) from a multitude of readily available stories, stories that circulate widely thanks to America’s cultural and economic cachet.

I can relate. A first-generation American of an Indian mother and an Indo-Caribbean father, I was a teenager with an undeniable passion for reading stories in English—my native language. But the stories I encountered in English class impressed upon me the sense that on the whole, English literature is an art that expresses beautiful stories about beautiful (albeit flawed) white people. Throughout the course of my high-school career, I was assigned one novel authored by a person of color: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970). However, later exposure to newer voices as an English major in college and later on in postgraduate studies shaped the choices I went on to make as an English teacher, especially when I returned to the Midwest in 2010.

Western Reserve Academy (WRA) is a private, coeducational, college-preparatory boarding school in Ohio and my alma mater. In other words, before I was a BIPOC teacher at WRA, I was a BIPOC student there. Teaching English, I remained in my purported wheelhouse—and out of Shakespeare’s circle—because I wanted all my students and especially my BIPOC students to be aware of the coexistence of many, many stories. That my students read the works of Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison (and Maxine Hong Kingston, and Louise Erdrich, and Kirin Desai, and Dorothy Allison, and  . . . ) mattered more to me than how many touchpoints they experienced reading Shakespeare.

When I was a young teacher, I read a novel that corroborated my sense of alienation from my native language. A newly minted college graduate in a newly minted millennium, I was teaching sixth graders in an unfamiliar city (Portland, Oregon) and reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Reading stories was a way to cope with the loneliness that comes with repositioning oneself in a new place and beginning afresh. In the novel, Smith’s biracial protagonist, Irie Jones, listens to her English teacher drone on about “Sonnet 127.” Irie daydreams, fantasizing her metamorphosis “from Jamaican hourglass heavy . . . to English Rose,” when Mrs. Roody snaps her out of reverie and implores her to pay attention. Seconds later, the instructor strikes again: this time, the scolding involves Irie’s childhood friend Millat, a young British Pakistani man who is perhaps the only other person of color in the classroom and certainly the subject of Irie’s ardent affection. Though Millat is the one clowning around, Roody admonishes Irie: “Miss Jones, will you stop looking mournfully at the door? He’s gone, alright, unless you’d like to join him?” Roody presses on, soliciting Irie’s commentary on the poem, and Irie ventures to say that the subject of the speaker’s desire is a Black woman. Roody rushes to correct her:

No, dear, she’s dark. She’s not black in the modern sense. There weren’t any . . . well, Afro-Carri-bee-yans in England at that time, dear. That’s more a modern phenomenon, as I’m sure you know. But this was the 1600s. I mean I can’t be sure, but it does seem terribly unlikely, unless she was a slave of some kind, and he’s unlikely to have written a series of sonnets to a lord and then a slave, is he?

The student pushes back a little, citing lines, but the teacher corrects her again, ending the lesson with this pearl: ‘“Never read what is old with a modern ear.’’’ The scene concludes when a classmate passes Irie a note on her way out the room: ‘“By William Shakespeare: ODE TO LETITIA AND ALL MY KINKY-HAIRED BIG-ASS BITCHEZ.’’’^[2]

Fresh out of college, I had never met a fictitious character whose humiliation resonated so profoundly. I myself am the product of the Empire: How dare Irie (or I) see herself in Shakespeare? From my early days, I learned not to try. Reading Smith’s novel as a young woman and new English teacher harboring still-tender memories of high school, I felt a call to teach difference through literature. Many years later, I read Morrison’s articulation of the “white literary imagination” and found language that articulated my racialized experience. To unpack Morrison’s ideas is an ongoing, fruitful endeavor, but in my current reading of what she describes as “the white imagination,” I understand that it recognizes the human tendency to build identity against difference. Shoring up one’s sense of who they are means knowing who they are not: including the self by way of excluding the other. I thought, if the entire foundation of American literature has built itself under the dreamlike spell of “not-me” Africanism, why should I have not built my teaching career against Shakespeare and his compatriots: the “not-me”?^[3]

When I began teaching in the fall of 2000, I was an intern in a new program piloted to steer minorities into independent-school teaching territory. Now as then, independent schools face a chasm between heterogeneous student populations and a relatively homogeneous teaching force. In the 2023–24 school year, the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) reported 20.1 percent faculty of color and 33.2 percent students of color in over 1,600 US private schools “that are self-determining in mission and program and are governed by independent boards.”^[4] The numbers in the Midwest are even more alarming: 13.4% faculty of color and 32.9% students of color.^[5] Independent schools are organized around value propositions that most often come with sizable price tags; by nature, they are exclusive. Many leverage themselves as sites where future agents of change develop. Practically speaking, I landed my first teaching job out of college at an independent school because I myself am a product of independent schooling, not only at the secondary level but also at the small liberal-arts college level and in my formal education beyond. The near entirety of my teaching identity, then, has been articulated as a woman of color and a beneficiary of educational privilege who advocates for BIPOC students in privileged learning spaces. I tell the BIPOC students around me that being deeply attached to a privileged community and deeply committed to practicing anti-racist thinking need not be mutually exclusive.

In January of 2021, a confluence of events led me to rethink my mindset about teaching Shakespeare. Another wave of COVID hit, and our boarding school community shifted back to virtual learning for a few weeks. Boarding schools are a special subset of independent schools. For boarding school teachers, “working from home” again meant another interruption to a practicing way of life, where home and work are virtually the same. Much of what boarding-school teachers do involves spending time with students outside of the classroom and outside of the normal school day. For me, lockdown meant streaming lessons from “my” house—in the living room of school-provided campus housing—instead of teaching in my regular classroom, literally just across the street. It also meant fewer “working” hours because there were no weekly nights on dorm duty, no shared sit-down meals, no swim competitions to time, and no Desi Club events to organize.^[6]

Meanwhile, aftershocks of George Floyd’s very public murder still reverberated. Floyd’s death reignited conversations about teaching in English language arts and literacy (ELA) communities. Outside the echo chambers of diversity, equity, and inclusion practitioners, the call to anti-racist teaching gained greater traction. Stating that “literacy is liberation,” founders of the #DisruptText movement urged teachers to be more “culturally responsive” and implored their growing audiences to accept finally that “no curricular or instructional design is a neutral one.”^[7] To be clear about my standpoint, I agree; acknowledging the presence of many stories at once means making tough decisions about which stories we will or will not allocate the time and the resources to hear. On the other hand, some K–12 educators advocated for more measured action. In his Marshall Memo—“a weekly round-up of important ideas and research in K–12 education”—Kim Marshall rounded up a piece by Michael Kay that recommended teachers find new ways of approaching “canonical” texts.^[8] Whereas the #DistruptText founders argued for decentering the single story, Kay argued for recentering it.^[9]

I noticed this same tension at WRA, where a small set of parents were beginning to voice concerns about students reading The Bluest Eye in the English department’s third-level course. I marveled at noise about a novel that I myself studied as a WRA student in the 90s.^[10] While the concerns expressed spoke to fears of (re)exposure to sexual assault, and I wondered if the consternation was part backlash to Floyd protests and part anxiety about the increasing fluidity of course reading lists at WRA. The tradition of reading Shakespeare at each grade level, for example, had disappeared; so had long-standing selections like Beowulf and Siddhartha. One year, The Great Gatsby fell away to make room for Katie Kitamura’s Longshot, which students were reading to prepare for the author’s visit to campus the following year. In the parental protest, I sensed a kind of mourning for a woebegone time when the white literary imagination reigned supreme.

All of this is to say that January 2021 afforded the time and space to consider what WRA students read and why. Absent the relative slowness of lockdown life, I might have declined the opportunity to join a Shakespeare discussion group. Given the circumstances, I committed once I learned that the group would be made up of fellow secondary-school teachers and early modern–English scholars in and around the RaceB4Race (RB4R) event. If the symposium itself was eye-opening, bouncing ideas within my discussion group on Slack was mind-blowing. I appreciated learning how the scholarship had evolved since my school days to address racialized aspects of Shakespeare’s work head-on. The net effect was to trouble my disinterest in teaching Shakespeare enough to apply for the National Endowment for the Humanities–backed Transforming Shakespeare’s Tragedies program that was to take place the following year.

Transforming Shakespeare’s Tragedies co-directors Deborah Uman and Jennifer Flaherty designed the program for secondary-school teachers grappling with the ever-daunting challenge of connecting young people and Shakespeare. The idea was to infuse examinations of the plays themselves with new and exciting adaptations. On the docket of texts to be studied was Desdemona, a multi-modal collaboration between Toni Morrison, Rokia Traoré, and Peter Sellars, paired with its source text, Othello. The program appealed to me because I had recently received the green light to develop an elective on Morrison’s work. Aside from wanting to include Desdemona on the new course’s reading list, I knew the unlikelihood of my avoiding Shakespeare for another twenty years. In fact, the idea of teaching Shakespeare was beginning to grow on me. Such were the circumstances that brought me to Weber State University in the summer of 2022. I came for Morrison, but I left with the most unlikely of bedfellows. Maybe Shakespeare was for me after all.

Both the RB4R symposium and the Transforming Shakespeare’s Tragedies program tempered my inclination to shirk dominant narratives, but they did not shake my purpose in designing a class around Morrison’s work. Students accept Shakespeare’s cultural capital as undeniable, yet they remain woefully underexposed to Morrison’s work, usually under pretenses about the unsuitability of its content for teen audiences.^[11] My recent experience told me that parental fear about what will be lost also plays into it. As English educators, we know what advanced learners stand to gain from facing seemingly obtuse texts; I was experiencing the thrill of unlocking new meaning in a work that I had previously deemed untouchable (Othello) and placing it in relief to the polyphony of all of Morrison’s work and specifically, Desdemona.

Desdemona is one of Morrison’s last and most experimental works, proof of what comes of commingling authorial claims, performance modes, languages, and racial identities. The drama excavates the interior lives of the titular character, her maid, and all the women who appear in Othello only peripherally, or not at all. I thought it was ripe territory for my students to immerse themselves in what Ariane M. Balizet  described to me as the “polyphonic” presence in and around all stories.^[12] A polyphonic approach listens for softer, even silenced sounds within stories—some discoverable, some lost forever—that are in tension with each other.^[13] Balizet and I agree: the only way to disrupt the power dynamic that pushes a single story to the forefront of our young people’s minds is by teaching them to fine-tune for polyphony.

My first execution of the course therefore aimed to

1. interrogate assumptions about whose stories matter the most through inversion: Othello as the B-side to Desdemona
2. celebrate and spread all of Morrison’s artistry in general and particularly in Desdemona, a work that prioritizes excavating what lies beneath plain sight

Previous experiences teaching Morrison’s novels and especially Playing in the Dark revealed a tentativeness in my students: At best it was productive discomfort. At worst, it was disengagement as a result of meeting something hard to comprehend. Whenever students came out on the other side of discomfort, it was because they grappled with and found reward in the orality of Morrison’s storytelling. Morrison’s proclivity for call-and-response between both her characters and her readers appeals to my students because they are native to participatory culture. For them, the feedback loop is continuous; when someone says something, they say something right back.

I drew from Morrison’s tapestry of fiction and non-fiction to curate readings that would culminate with Desdemona. My design thinking applied RB4R scholarship by

1. encouraging what Adrienne Merritt refers to as “reading to listen,” a practice that promotes unruly, collaborative, and embedded meaning-making
2. fostering what Ian Smith refers to as “racial proximity”^[14]

Rooted in the oral tradition, Morrison’s writing is an aural reading experience. In my experience teaching Morrison’s stories, I had observed my students leaning more toward the oral and less toward the aural aspects of call-and-response. The preference makes sense, given their familiarity with performance tasks both in and out of the classroom. Whether preparing a slideshow for a school project or posting several times daily to their Snap(chats) and Insta(gram) feeds, my students are seasoned content creators. Coming from an education that prioritized expert knowledge and its systematic dispensation to novice learners, I am envious of how readily they produce evidence of their engagement. Ignoring the thirtyish years’ difference between how I experienced teenagedom and how my current students experience theirs would be as foolhardy as rejecting the four-hundred-year gap between the first Othello renderings on the stage and, say, how Hugh Quarshie depicts Othello in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2015 production, or Keith Hamilton Cobb’s version of Othello in American Moor. I mentioned previously that WRA students read from a more textured array of material than I did. Still, they need help mitigating the cacophonous, polarizing, and shallow race rhetoric that pervades public discourse in the contemporary moment. Utilizing Merritt’s reading to listen practice is a tool that sharpens their ability to be critical of the mixed messages they hear and infuses focused energy into the ongoing, exhausting struggle to realize racial justice.

Merritt describes deep listening as the art of “negotiation, dialogue, and conversation”;^[15] it is the negotiation piece that I find most interesting. As teachers, we are remiss not to model and expect that to listen is to negotiate. Modeling means deeply listening to and valuing what young people say and do. Expecting means establishing a clear methodology for assessing listening skills. Whereas I and my fellow Gen Xers struggle to make sense of vast multiverses and blurred lines between writer and reader, teenagers are game to reimagine author(ity). I remember feeling like a novice, wholly out of my element when discussing RB4R scholarship with experts. I felt similarly in the cohort I joined at Weber State, where teachers were spending part of their summer vacation studying Shakespeare because they were professed Shakespeare enthusiasts. Some were the seasoned experts at their home (mostly public) institutions. Being one of only two BIPOC participants also placed me in unfamiliar terrain: I was one, a conscientious objector to lionizing the Bard; and the other was a pre-service teacher who was receiving undergraduate credit for participating. Recognized scholars and master teachers at RB4R and The Shakespeare Institute (TSI) programs invited me to their table; I would invite my students to mine.

Still, I wondered how to demonstrate a genuine desire to hear and value the fresh, expansive thinking that I knew my students to be capable of. Once a BIPOC student and now a BIPOC teacher, I decided to deal with discomfort like Baby Suggs in Beloved: by laying down my sword and my shield.^[16] What I needed to remember was that I was no longer the twenty-two-year-old graduate broaching adulthood and reading a character like Irie Jones for the first time. More importantly, my students were not inexperienced in encountering racialized characters like Irie. I saw that to approximate my experience to theirs would be to denigrate the new and nuanced ways that they engage with a text. My feelings as a teenager were implicitly buried beneath layers of assimilation and model-minority narratives; I suspected that their feelings were better attuned to recognize explicit experiences of racist microaggressions. I needed to listen if I truly wanted to know for sure.

Teaching is a relational exercise. True reciprocity is impossible without cultivating authentic relationships in the classroom. In a RB4R conversation moderated by Kim F. Hall, Ian Smith describes “racial proximity” as not only spatial and intellectual proximity, but also proximity generated through the reading of difficult texts. Smith goes on to suggest that the “most intimate of proximities” is self-encounter: “confrontation and the reckoning with oneself.”^[17] Put another way, Smith calls honest social justice work (as opposed to fad-driven “racial tourism”) a kind of commingling: “speaking with others and learning about oneself in the process of doing that work.”^[18] Teaching at my alma mater, I wanted my seniors to know that I was willing to do the work.

As a rule, I have drawn from my personal experience when discussing privilege and its problems with my students, but Smith’s articulation of racial proximity clarified my intuitive practice. I have taught all grades at all levels, but this class was designed with a particular set in mind, so a composite of the students who enrolled is helpful. Most of my fourteen students had already completed a three-year trajectory of a curriculum designed to build progressively complex thinking, reading, speaking, and writing skills. If not, they had otherwise met the gatekeeping criteria to be eligible for WRA’s college-level English electives. Electives allow choice, and among those opting in, twelve presented as women, seven identified as BIPOC, four were international students, three were first-generation American (including one student whose father is Guyanese, like mine is), and one was first-generation college bound. I knew these snippets about my students’ lives because many of them were enrolled in one of my two college-level offerings the previous semester: Writing Memory or Divided by Class. Both courses included personal writing assignments that invited (but did not require) the disclosure of such details. Some I had taught as fresh-people in the first course of the aforementioned scope and sequence; others I knew from dorm duty or clubs. One was my four-year advisee, meaning that I had attended her athletic competitions, met with her parents, and arranged holiday gift exchanges for her and my five other charges on too many occasions to count. My racial proximity to these fourteen individuals, in other words, had been in development for some time.

To address racial proximity is risky because it calls for trust and reciprocity. In my case, “doing the work” meant owning the geography and history of the place and space I shared with these fourteen individuals. Unless I committed to probing my racialized experience more explicitly, my students would not probe alongside me. Each and every one of my students is a  racialized being who experiences more or less privilege than I did in the last dregs of the twentieth century. I walked the halls of the same academic buildings, ran the same cross-country course, and lined up for (more homogenized) meals at the dining hall. WRA’s stunning, sprawling campus sits on what once was the town (now the city) of Hudson, nestled in the suburbs of Northeastern Ohio between the urban centers of Akron and Cleveland. The “oldest frame structure on its original foundations in Summit County” was built by the town’s founder, David Hudson; the house is now one of several historically registered homes used to provide faculty housing on campus. David Hudson was an abolitionist who famously provided sanctuary for those on the Underground Railroad circuit.^[19] His historic house is a source of local pride, which makes the giant rock with a plaque just a stone’s throw from where I live on the adjacent street even more troubling. Commemorating Hudson’s original log dwelling, the plaque declares:

NEAR THIS SPOT
STOOD THE FIRST LOG HOUSE
IN SUMMIT COUNTY
BUILT BY DAVID HUDSON
OF GOSHEN CONNECTICUT IN 1799
IT WAS THE BIRTHPLACE
OCTOBER 28 1800 OF THE FIRST
WHITE CHILD IN THIS COUNTY
ANNA MARIA HUDSON

I know my students, and I understand their confusion. On the one hand: the rock. On the other: public declarations writ large. In her scholarship on Shakespeare and anticolonialism, Amrita Dhar offers sage advice to teachers who weather the emotional highs and lows that come as tides shift between true activism and performative virtue signaling and back again. “Recalling to life” bell hooks and Rabindranath Tagore,^[20] she reminds us that “we still have our classrooms, our desks, our libraries, our discussions—all of which we can use to imagine necessary transgressions, places of genuine hope, and a world where the mind is without fear and the head is held high.”^[21] I do not control trending nomenclature, or external estimations of my value as a diversity practitioner, but in my classroom, I set the conditions for precipitating authentic space and place for change: instead of outward-directed performance, inward-facing drama.

The leap from theoretical underpinnings to teaching practice is never easy. Knowing that the Morrison elective would lead to pairing Morrison and Shakespeare added another layer of anxiety when I began teaching it in January 2023. As a ritual, I always ask my students to complete a questionnaire in the first week of any new class. I give class time for students to handwrite responses to a set of personal questions inviting disclosure to the degree of their individual preferences (Box A). To normalize the process of give and take, I write hypertext in the margins of their responses, make copies for my files, and return the originals promptly.

Another throughline in my teaching practice is to publish, post, and point out the conversation agreements established by the school’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office, as well as my own articulated expectations:

We come together from a wild, beautiful array of perspectives. Per our Head of School, Mrs. Buck, WRA is committed to addressing the grey shades between intention and impact in our multitudinous interactions. Your enrollment in a discussion-based college-level course suggests a willingness to probe that light and shadow within our classroom space. I know I can count on you to broach difficult subject matter with empathy and grace.

I will not tolerate words or actions that reek of harmful intentions. Moreover, please tell me (or another trusted adult) if you feel threatened in class because of anyone else’s words or actions (myself included!).

Formerly established proximities provided a head start for establishing racial proximity, but setting the conditions for deep listening was trickier. Even as springtime seniors, students hesitated to disturb the hierarchy of things. Entrenched in the dynamics of power, they were afraid to play if “playing” could bring undesirable consequences. After all, I was still the person who would enter their grades at the end of the semester. Another problem was that reading to listen felt counterintuitive to their sensibilities about how to hold space. Born on the cusp of a new century, Generation Z is habituated to say/write first and listen/read second. Who can blame them? All their lives, they have experienced the gratification of instant feedback. Listening takes time, and for my TikTok-ready constituency, timing is everything. The fear of being off-trend—or worse, entirely missing the moment—is ubiquitous. I expected my students to be skeptical of my disregard for authoritarian instructional design; still, I hoped they would learn to trust the “messiness” of call-and-response,^[22] especially since Morrison’s work so openly invites it. I noticed a kind of cognitive dissonance; though natives to participatory culture, students expressed intolerance for anything but explicit instructions. The attitude seemed, in part, the effect of living in lockdown during the prepubescent years of their education. Buried fear of death and dying aside, they harbored cloudy, conflicting expectations about what learning looks and feels like. Of course, disambiguating procedures is an important aspect of ritual-setting, but the ambiguity of not knowing is the stuff of creativity itself.

I tried to establish recursiveness into our daily class routine. Every period began with time set aside to handwrite a response to a seven-minute writing prompt, which I pitched as low stakes, exploratory, and inward facing: by the student and only for the student to practice an interior monologue. Choosing a notebook dedicated solely for the dialectical purposes of the class and choosing a pleasurable writing utensil (preferably a pen) were my only two stipulations. Pen and paper were meant to emphasize the materiality of the writing and learning space and slow down their thinking. Drawing from a practice I learned in a summer workshop at Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking, I presented the process:

Your dialectic notebook will contain responses to numerous, formative “writing to think” exercises. The key is to write—and keep writing—to build fluency. Perhaps you will surprise yourself with what emerges. I will collect your work at the end of the semester, and you will receive full credit so long as your entries are clearly labeled, dated, and completed with a good faith effort.

I also encouraged students to fold down and staple any response that felt too personal to risk discovery. I crafted prompts and wrote them on the whiteboard before class because I wanted entering the space to mean entering the text. Whenever possible, I joined the table to write in my own book. One prompt read: “Line by line, compare and contrast Saran’s Willow song (in Morrison) with Barbary’s (in Shakespeare).”

After meeting the text came mingling vis-à-vis pair and share or whole group chatter: from monologue to dialogue. Occasionally, students took and/or discussed a quiz, an assessment designed to reward recursive engagement, as opposed to initial completeness and correctness. Functionally speaking, a quiz resembled the first piece of writing I had collected, the questionnaire. Quizzes were unannounced, usually distributed in class (though sometimes paired with a nightly reading assignment), and immediately discussed in class with a colored pen in hand. In this case, the hypertext was self-produced annotations of insights opened up through peer-to-peer conversations.

The low- and medium-stakes writing events of dialectic entries and quizzes primed students for the main show: making meaning together through Socratic-style seminars. At first I facilitated our conversations to model how to manage the art of call-and-response, but one-third of our way into the semester and as trust accrued, I receded from my authorial position. At this point, I required that each student facilitate one class period. My goal was to scaffold how to engage in honest, critical dialogue about complex, oft-uncomfortable subject matter. To foster risky conversations, I provided explicit parameters for preparing the task (Box B).

The exercises described above were a rehearsal for the final act: producing an exploratory project I envisioned as an apex to their high-school English education. The task was to conceive of, discuss, plan, and execute open-ended passion projects during the final few weeks of class. I wanted the kind of polyphonous collaboration embodied by my RB4R and TSI experiences, not to mention manifest in Desdemona itself. Having spent the semester listening, I hoped they would be ready to say something about what they heard. Together.

Results varied. One person—notably, the only student with whom I had no prior interactions because he was new to the school that year and new to my classroom that semester—wrote a traditional paper as proof of his scholarly engagement. Others produced artifacts and corresponding statements of artistic intent, the range of which included an original multi-movement score for Jazz and a digital story comparing and contrasting female friendships in Sula and A Mercy. In the aforementioned examples, both students chose to read another of Morrison’s novels (they read Sula in class), and both submitted high-quality work products commensurate with the rigor expected of students taking the highest-level English class offered at the school. However substantive their final work, though, most projects fell short of my mark. Though creative, they were not collaborative. Except one.

“Burn” was an original play produced by the only five people enrolled in the smaller of my two teaching sections.^[23] Each young woman wrote one scene. Together they blocked and rehearsed their dramatic delivery; they coordinated costumes and props; risking rebuke for not asking permission in advance, they even ventured into the unlocked theater to practice on the stage. The evening before their performance, they ran across campus collecting fresh flowers to garnish their one prop, a hat that moved from performer to performer as each took turns embodying Sula. Each collaborator submitted a personal statement detailing the creative process as a whole, as well as their individual roles in behind-the-scenes decision-making. It was beautiful, joyful work.

Just as Desdemona excavates, “Burn” excavates. The first carves space for Desdemona to say—and listen—to the people who love her but hurt her anyway; the second carves that same kind of space for Sula. The play itself was an adaptation of Sula, but the technical approach was Desdemona meets Othello. In other words, the work synthesized form and content. Formwise: it was collaborative, it was imaginative. As a class whole, five individuals addressed many stories at once (Othello, Desdemona, and Sula) and spoke back to their storytellers (Shakespeare, Morrison, Traoré, and Sellars) through embodied performance. Contentwise, the subject matter allowed for reconciliation borne from chasing polyphony. In Desdemona, the protagonist revisits and reprocesses her relationships through a series of conversations, including an interaction with her jealous, murderous husband. In “Burn,” Sula confronts and reconciles with many people, including her best friend Nel. Theirs was a relationship also torn asunder by jealousy.

Interweaving texts amplifies uncomfortable truths about humans: humans spit, humans hit, humans rape. Humans murder. Whether or not thinking about my work in this way better equips me to reach my students authentically remains debatable, but the difference in tone and tenor between two comments pulled from anonymous student surveys reveals something. Both comments came from seniors enrolled in a semester-long, college-level elective. From 2019, the first is for a course that was a previous iteration of Writing Memory and included the study of Beloved:

Student Comment—Fall 2019 The Effects of Memory

I am very disappointed with this class. I have never disliked being in a classroom so much in my life. It was annoying that we weren’t given the choice of our English class this year and where I ended up only made it worse. I feel as though the teacher picks favorites, which usually I’m not opposed to because I work hard and am generally liked by teachers. However, I believe this teacher chose favorites based on their gender and race. It was very apparent to me that our teacher did not like boys. She favorited [sic] the girls in the class, which made it impossible to participate. Being white only made it worse as she seemed to connect with people of color more and leave those who were not out of the discussion. I am grateful that this year’s English is split into 2 semesters because I could not see myself spending another minute in an environment as uncomfortable, awkward, boring, and aggravating as this class.

I nearly fell apart when I saw the disconnect between the experience I thought I had created and what the student had experienced. As always, time has lessened the sting enough to process the feedback. This young man had probably read Beloved as assigned, a story he in all likelihood would not have read otherwise. At least his discomfort in a class led by a BIPOC teacher with mostly BIPOC peers occurred under no threat of physical violence or menace to his personal safety—the circumstances under which so many other people first experience difference.

From 2023, the second is feedback on the Morrison elective:

Student Comment—Spring 2023 Deep Dive: Toni Morrison

I really enjoyed this class because it really opened up my mind to new ways of thinking: I was able to look at traditional texts from a variety of perspectives and found that my interest in literature was reinforced. I now analyze texts that I read without there having to be a mandatory assignment, and I look at writing from a more creative and free perspective. Diving into a particular author, especially one like Toni Morrison, also allowed me to grasp the essence of her writing and her notable style. I really enjoyed taking this class and I hope it is offered to future generations of English students.

Taken together, my personal and professional experiences point toward four interrelated design principles. I urge administrators, scholars, and fellow teachers to bear the following in mind when crafting curriculum and teaching plans:

1. Disturb the hierarchy. Decentralize Shakespeare by presenting the literature in tension with other literature. Rearranging the presentation of texts to young people is social-justice work because it troubles internalized messages about white supremacy. Repositioning Shakespeare in concert with other texts dismantles problematic rhetoric about Shakespeare’s universal appeal; it invites my students and me—us—to grapple directly with Shakespeare’s language and to discuss its particularity alongside the particularity of other complex languages (in my example, the works of Toni Morrison).

Considering the precarious position of humanities teaching at all levels, as well as my limited understanding of the machinery of higher learning, I design for discomfort knowing that many of my students do not and likely will not learn the nuanced differences between early modern English studies, race studies, and cultural studies. What I know is that re-inscriptions of racist thinking harm BIPOC teens today as much or more as they damaged me when I was coming of age at the close of the twentieth century.

2. Model discomfort. Any teacher worth her salt knows that one’s teaching space is simultaneously one’s learning space: to be vulnerable in holding and facilitating the space for difficult conversations is to open meaningful, authentic learning for all persons who inhabit it. Through messiness, through discomfort, we must do the work of opening ourselves to teaching with love. This means embodying the particularity of personal experience and valuing the particularity of the people with whom I co-create the space.

3. Play with time, and make space. Making space takes time. For better and worse, divided attention and conflicting priorities are endemic to Generation Z students. Teach students how to listen for polyphony first and respond to it second. There is no magic bullet to eradicate racial injustice. By slowing down, we help students focus on being fully present with oneself and with one another. If we accept that teaching and learning are a corporeal experience, we need to carve space for recursive rituals: less typing on screens, more writing on paper, and above all, more participating in call-and-response. Crucially, making time and space means accepting bits and pieces and understanding the impossibility of realizing the whole. RB4R and Transforming Shakespeare’s Tragedies thinkers provide a license to refer to one’s own positionality in teaching parts and pieces of texts in tandem.

4. Teach with love. Recognizing the fragmentary nature of knowledge lessens the inevitable mourning that comes with loss. Bits and pieces fall away or are not knowable in the first place. To teach with love means forgiving ourselves for the erosion. Young people feel damage in ways other than we do. Some of it is surmisable—the aftereffects of spending their formative years in quarantine, surviving online public shaming, or recovering from a hate crime, for instance. A truly twenty-first-century English education takes stories as parts coalescing into what Morrison herself once articulated as something like (but never fully) the whole of reading and writing stories in English.^[24]

Perhaps no greater power has been manifested in Western literature than the power that has been (re)enacted in Shakespearean study. Of course, how well a story moves its audiences differs according to interpretive evaluation—of aesthetic beauty, of personal taste, and of demographic resonance—but the notion that canonical works and their writers matter more, and that they are better and therefore more worthy of our students’ serious study because they have weathered time and remain beautiful is a major roadblock to genuine anti-racist teaching. Less out of protest and more out of desperation to see myself in the stories I read with my English students (especially those who have felt othered in their education), I spent the first two decades of my career interweaving voices from the margins with the “great literature” I was asked to teach. It is important to say here that my freedom to interweave was the result of working in places that granted me the privilege and trust to do so. The pandemic unexpectedly presented me with the time to discover new scholarship, which in turn caused me to reassess my teaching practice.

To be clear, my goal is not to teach the Morrison elective always and forever or even to become better prepared to teach an elective on Shakespeare (by my way of thinking, such a class would demand confronting Othello and interweaving it with excerpts from Desdemona). Rather, I want to challenge my own relatability to some stories and alienation from others to transgress text and stories alongside my students. Empowering students to make meaning of challenging texts may bring us all closer to experiencing the “something else” described by Ian Smith: an educational space in which we immerse ourselves in text, sometimes awash in greater self-knowledge and sometimes amiss and uncomfortable sharing in the lived experiences of others.^[25] All of it is aimed at encouraging students to understand the polyphonic nature of stories: never one single story but many stories at once, ongoing and changing in perpetuity—mine, theirs, and of those many, many others.

Box A: First Week Questionnaire For All Classes

Ms. Maseelall, adapted from teacher S. Douglas Ray
Before We Ever Write, We Are
(A Student Questionnaire)

The title of this questionnaire comes from a line in Eudora Welty’s essay “Must the Novelist Crusade?” That sentence reminds us that the work of this class—reading, writing, thinking, and knowing—marks us as humans. Our lived experiences, the stories we make and share, form the fabric of our individual and collective histories.

We are going to be spending an appreciable amount of time together; before we jump into the journey ahead of us, I would like to get to know you. Each classroom community is different because it is shaped by different personalities, which are representations of different experiences, values, attitudes, and aspirations.

Spend about 20 minutes answering these questions. You may answer in complete sentences, fragments, found text, or however you see fit. I ask, though, that you do answer in English!

1. What name would you like to be called in this class?
2. What are your preferred gender pronouns?
3. What are you anxious about and excited about at this very moment?
4. What class do you look forward to going to the most, and why?
5. What class do you least look forward to going to, and why?
6. Beyond your academic classes, what activities or sports are you involved in? What is your passion?
7. What are three or four words that your friends would use to describe you?
8. What’s something you miss?
9. For each of the following categories, name one or two of your faves:
   Example of the “Food” category: Ms. Maseelall loves Thai red curry, NYC–style pizza, and lamb vindaloo

• • Food
  • Movies
  • TV Shows
  • Social
  • Books
  • Music
  • Historical Figures
  • Places
  • Celebrities
  • Words
  • Gift(s) You’ve Received

10. In three zany, super short micro-sentences, write down your story:
11. Is there anything else you’d like me to know, whether it be news I can use about your learning habits, or something else?
12. Name a salient take away from your life as a learner.

Box B: Guidelines for Students Leading Risky Conversations

Discussion Leads: Guidelines

Teaching a class allows you to be creative and exploratory in a unique way. The best class leaders tend to seek my feedback on their lesson plans in advance of their assigned teaching day.

Your task is to engender a stimulating conversation about the assigned reading. In a minimum of 40 minutes (but feel free to take the full 65 minutes), you are to address/present with originality and creativity a way into the material. Your goal is to encourage high quality, inclusive participation. The presentation MUST INCLUDE the facilitation of close analysis of at least one passage from the text.

You will be evaluated according to the following:

• Creativity & originality
• Evidence of preparation
• Quality of the presentation
• Level and distribution of class involvement
• Effectiveness of passage analysis, with specific page numbers provided

Bibliography

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED Talk. Streamed July 2009. TEDGlobal Video. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/c.

Agresta, Angelina, Elba Heddesheimer, Sara Jones, Sheilla Muligande, and Jenny Williams. “Burn.” Unpublished manuscript, last modified May 16, 2023.

Dadabhoy, Ambereen, Eric L. De Barros, and Brenna Duperron. “RaceB4Race Education Day 3: Ambereen Dadabhoy, Eric L. De Barros, and Brenna Duperron.” RaceB4Race (RB4R) Conference, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Panel streamed January 22, 2021. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBiW dcshiaU&list=PLeP07FwIFW8goHgPFdesaD0g2vXvXBYO6 &index=3.

“David Hudson: Founder of Hudson.” Hudson Memory. Accessed April 17, 2024. https://www.hudsonmemory.org/people/david-hudson-2/.

Dhar, Amrita. “On Shakespeare, Anticolonial Pedagogy, and Being Just.” In Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy in US Higher Education: Social Justice and Institutional Contexts, edited by Marissa Greenberg and Elizabeth Williamson, 23–43. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024.

Ebarvia, Tricia. “DT: January 2021 Statement.” Blog. #DisruptTexts, January 2021. https://disrupttexts.org/2021/01/02/january-2021-statement/.

Elam, Michele. “Signs Taken for Wonders: AI, Art & the Matter of Race.” Daedalus 151, no. 2 (2022): 198–217. https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_ a_ 01910

Kay, Matthew R.  “Seeing the Curriculum with Fresh Eyes.” EL Magazine 78, no 5 (February 1, 2021). https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/seeing-the-curriculum-with-fresh-eyes

Marshall, Kim.  Marshall Memo 875. February 22, 2021. https:// massp.com/sites/default/files/inline-files/MarshMemo875.pdf.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 1987.

———. Desdemona. With lyrics by Rokia Traoré and with a forward by Peter Sellars. London: Methuen Drama, 2021.

———. “Memory, Creation, and Writing.” Thought  59, no. 4 (1984): 385–90. https://doi.org/10.5840/thought198459430.

———. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

———. Sula. New York: Vintage, 1973.

National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS). “About NAIS.” Accessed April 18, 2024. https://www.nais.org/about/#:~:text=The National Association of Independent,self-determining in mission and

———. 2024 Facts at a Glance. Washington, DC: NAIS Data and Analysis for School Leadership (DASL), 2024. https://www.nais.org/getmedia/43a2316b-c40d-47cb-95f3-656c95a6fc62/Facts-at-a-Glance-2023- 2024- (ISACS).pdf

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). “The Dangers of a Single Story: Another Viewpoint for Teachers.” Literacy and NCTE (blog). April 16, 2023. https://ncte.org/blog/2023/04/the-dangers-of-a-single-story-another-viewpoint-for-teachers

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.

Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. New York: Vintage International, 2000.

Thompson, Ayanna, and Laura Turchi. Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose. New York Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016.