Chicago Shakespeare Theater launched its education program thirty years ago, beginning an enduring commitment to the teachers and students of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS)— the nation’s third-largest district. To support Chicago’s district-wide focus on literacy, in 2004 Chicago Shakespeare created a yearlong professional learning program, offered free of charge and designed specifically for the needs and practice of CPS teachers. Called Bard Core Curriculum: Reading into Shakespeare, this thirty-hour course has since introduced more than four hundred teachers of diverse English and English language learners to rehearsal hall practices that intersect with best practices in literacy—and which have proved powerful tools in helping students engage and create meaning with texts as complex as Shakespeare. Bard Core and related programs for students in grades six through twelve and their teachers have earned national and international recognition.

As in many large urban school districts (Chicago’s District 219 has 630 schools), the approach to teaching and learning in CPS changes with each new mayoral administration and its appointments. Some administrations have endorsed district-wide curriculum; others have granted greater autonomy to schools. Despite the enduring popularity of canonical works, Shakespeare has a tenuous hold in the curriculum: district-wide leadership, individual principals, department chairs, and teachers have periodically condoned sidestepping the nitty-gritty work—and play—of active engagement with Shakespeare’s language, his characters, and their all-too-human and recognizable relationships.

From its earliest days as a storefront theater, Chicago Shakespeare has approached Shakespeare without particular reverence. Onstage, directors have routinely and unabashedly cut, abridged, adapted, conceptualized, and reinvented Shakespeare. Similarly, the theater’s education team has approached Shakespeare’s work as a “vehicle rather than a destination”^[1] and as a path toward literacy: to build reading muscles, to develop the capacity for empathy, to reflect personal identity, and to develop self-confidence through comprehending what was previously incomprehensible.

The primary objective of Bard Core’s work is building reading skills in reluctant and struggling readers through approaching Shakespeare’s language head-on. A Shakespeare script becomes our “painter’s palette” in which to dip our brushes as we practice ways to break open complex texts.  Most of the education program’s mentors consequently have been experts in adolescent literacy—Carol Jago, Kylene Beers, Chris Tovani, and Jeffrey Wilhelm, among many others. Collectively, their groundbreaking work provides paths through the dense thicket of words that can deter students from engaging with a text as complex and unfamiliar as Shakespeare. In mining Shakespeare’s language from selected portions of a play, students become engaged through drama-based work, which invites them to become co-creators with Shakespeare and his script as living, changing, permeable—and, yes, approachable.

Bard Core’s classroom begins as an empty space located on the top floor of Chicago Shakespeare’s theater building on Navy Pier—overlooking Lake Michigan and the city’s iconic skyline. Our view is open, expansive, and light-filled—a place out of the ordinary in our urban landscape. We use that resource with intention: our classroom is designed as a space to welcome, to think creatively, to broaden perspectives, and to open our minds. We are well aware that we sit in a most privileged location in this complicated city of ours. Throughout our education programs, we share this space with purpose: to make it a part of the teachers’ and students’ world and their lived experiences. It is our objective to foster from day one a sense of belonging in, and to, our theater.

When teachers enter the first day, the empty room has been transformed into a dynamic classroom: graphic posters line the walls and poster-size quotes, which frame the work ahead, celebrate the ideas of published theorists and practitioners alongside former Bard Core teachers. One expansive wall is reserved to feature the new cohort and its forthcoming work: participants’ headshots, taken on the first day; short teaching bios they write during the first class; and a journal entry capturing a moment from their classroom in the past year that they treasure. Teachers also write a narrative description of one particular student who eluded them—and whom they bring with them into Bard Core’s classroom, where we will work to reimagine a teaching practice that can purposefully engage challenged readers and learners. Throughout the eight sessions of Bard Core, the wall continues to evolve as teachers post their work, questions, and ideas.

Tables are arranged in an open rectangle; the area in the center becomes a performance space. PowerPoint presentations and lectures are banished: Bard Core utilizes active, participatory learning—modeling throughout the seminar the education department team’s approach to teaching and learning. The work is active Shakespeare—the name given to this practice by Dr. Rex Gibson, whose passionate work with teachers through his Teaching Shakespeare Institute at Cambridge University revolutionized the approach to Shakespeare as an unstable, mutable script as opposed to a revered, static artifact of literature. In an environment of peer support and inquiry, participants are encouraged to take the same risks that they will ask of their students in the coming weeks. With each new strategy, teachers first experience the work by stepping into their students’ shoes before processing it with their peers and discussing the takeaways and modifications they will consider for their own students and classroom. In Bard Core’s classroom, teachers participate as learners—and as teachers among their peers and the theater’s education team.

Bard Core uses drama-based activities adapted from rehearsal-room practice to answer some of the key questions facing literary educators. How can literature teachers help struggling or reluctant readers . . .

• to visualize text?
• to read, and re-read, with purpose—and with engagement?
• to make personal and cultural connections to the story and its characters?
• to walk in the shoes of a character and see the world from another point of view?
• to play with words and their sounds?
• to risk making their own interpretations of a text—and to be engaged enough to want to do so?
• to ask questions about the author’s intent, language, characters, and the stories of a text—no matter how canonical and entrenched it might be in our curricula?

By answering these questions, teachers are empowered. Instead of relying on translations like No Fear Shakespeare for groups likely to struggle with Shakespeare, teachers learn to give students the opportunity to creatively engage with Shakespeare’s muscular language and play—with its dramatic storyline, larger-than-life characters, and knotty relationships. Teachers gain “permission” (they are indeed urged) not to teach an entire play but to use both cutting and selected portions to plumb more deeply. In our experience, cutting Shakespeare is one of the most effective ways to engage an audience—be they seated in a theater or classroom.

Strategies like Choral Montage focus attention on a key speech or passage. This activity also serves as an effective gateway activity for teachers of literature, who may enter Bard Core with less experience, and consequently less comfort, in embodied work in their classrooms. Honoring the space that can lie between our expertise as theater practitioners and theirs as literature teachers, we purposefully introduce embodied work, meeting teachers where they are in their practice and utilizing, as well as developing, their honed skills in composition and editing. The Choral Montage makes the editing process—so often rejected by students as a useless and frustrating waste of time—into a physical, visual activity that requires cooperation, creative expression, and play.

In Choral Montage, as described by Jeffrey Wilhelm,^[2] students pair up to read a selected passage featuring two characters. In response to a specific moment in the story, each student writes a letter from one character to another. Sharing their letter with a partner, each circles a sentence, a few keywords, or a simple phrase that appears significant and leaps out from their partner’s writing. The circled words/phrase/sentence becomes each partnership’s contribution to a larger group poem composed from the contributions of three or four pairs working collaboratively. Following a popular improv activity, Pearls on a String, students then stand in a line as they work out which words/phrases/sentences will begin, end, and fill in a found poem that the group creates from their classmates’ combined contributions. As they test out various compositions, the unfinished poem is repeated as students move into new positions in the line; if there are words/phrases/sentences that they want repeated for emphasis, the student moves from place to place as they restate their line. Once the group has created its own draft to its satisfaction, the rest of the class joins as collaborators, proposing further edits to the poem’s structure as the contributors again change places in the line to read and reread subsequent drafts suggested by their classmates. As a class, their final draft is reached by consensus.^[3]

Choral Montage has been demonstrated to be a powerful, collaborative exercise that meaningfully engages students as co-creators of text. Through the years, we have paired passages from Shakespeare with the students’ own writing and with contemporary plays, poetry, informational text, and fiction, creating an intertextual dialogue between the two. It has proven to be an endlessly adaptable activity, allowing us to address the Eurocentrism pervasive in Western curricula. In a broadly diverse urban school district like CPS, in which just 11.1 percent of its students are white and just shy of 25 percent of its student population is enrolled as English language learners,^[4] Bard Core has known that ubiquitous Shakespeare needs to be challenged by the work of authors with life experiences reflective of our students’.

May 25, 2020. The brutal, horrific murder of George Floyd was captured on video for the world to witness. And the long-overdue racial reckoning that followed rocked our country as we came face to face, once again, with this nation’s deep divisions, its unresolved history, and our shame. From the words we uttered to the books we read, we were bound for a long-overdue self-reflection, interrogation, and radical course correction. In a concerted effort to curate a more inclusive curriculum, many English departments opted to remove or decenter Shakespeare among other white canonical European and American writers. At the same time, cultural organizations across the country committed to a reassessment of their artistic programming, educational offerings, and staffing practices. Shakespeare theaters faced a unique dilemma: How do they maintain their organizational identity closely bound to Shakespeare while working to decenter their eponymous playwright throughout their programming?

Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s education team had to take a critical look at this playwright’s privileged place in its teaching practices. That process of interrogation (informed in part by the groundbreaking work of RaceB4Race, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Folger Shakespeare Library) led the team to rethink how the drama-based strategies at the core of its work could bring the voices of authors of color, side by side with Shakespeare, into an imaginative, activity-based conversation. With the objective to disrupt a troubled text from the past like Shakespeare, how might works from past and present be paired, informing one another through drama-based strategies? Deborah Appleman, in her clarion work Literature and the New Culture Wars, asserts that in pairing texts we can “teach who we have been as well as who we are striving to become.”^[5] How might the same powerful drama-based strategies be reimagined to both recognize and grapple with the racism in Shakespeare’s language, characters, and stories rooted in the early modern period’s fervor of exploration, migration, colonization, and slavery?

Throughout our work with teachers and students, we set out to explore a variety of activities that would place Shakespeare into meaningful conversation with authors of color. Here, we describe the evolution of the Choral Montage, modified to equip students with tools to explore Shakespeare’s racially charged language. The revised Choral Montage, adapted to include a twenty-first-century thinker who is focused on the role that race played in Shakespeare’s work, offers students both a lens and useful language through which to explore this four-hundred-year-old dramatic text. Such drama-based strategies offer creative agency to students in a classroom of active, engaged, and collaborative learners. Activities like this reimagined Choral Montage also decenter Shakespeare in those classrooms, situating his language in conversation with other authors’ points of view.

We chose a passage from the year’s focus play, Macbeth. We paired Macduff’s testing of Malcolm in Act Four, scene three, with a nonfiction passage transcribed from an episode in the Shakespeare’s Globe podcast series Such Stuff, entitled “How Whiteness Dominates the Study of Shakespeare,” featuring early modern Critical Race scholars Ambereen Dadabhoy (Harvey Mudd College) and Farah Karim-Cooper (Shakespeare’s Globe).^[6]

Using these two short excerpts—one dramatic, the other informational—the adapted Choral Montage closely follows the instructions outlined above.^[7] Now, in lieu of two characters speaking to one another through the students’ first-person letters, the choral poem weaves Macbeth’s racially charged language with Dadabhoy’s challenge that, in our classroom discussions about Shakespeare, we no longer ignore the pervasive, unquestioned lens of whiteness permeating the canon. Dadabhoy asks that we “take seriously those moments in Shakespeare where race comes up,” that we no longer view this playwright as “a transcendent figure, without race, without gender, without politics.” Shakespeare’s play, within a few short, damning lines, attributes the monikers of villain and devil to “black Macbeth.” In selecting key words, passages, and sentences from these two excerpts, the Choral Montage places the two texts in conversation with one another. The full video recording and transcript of the Dadabhoy/Karim-Cooper conversation is available online, offering teachers and students a further opportunity to delve into an illuminating conversation between two preeminent early modernist scholars of color.^[8]

Talking about matters of race in a classroom requires both language and trust on the parts of students and their teacher. Pairing Dadabhoy’s podcast with a passage from Shakespeare, we offer students both new ideas and, equally important, specific language that can help them interrogate what they read. We maintain the text in the curriculum, but we choose to help students consider it through other points of view.

The purposeful pairing of two texts like this can give students an entry point to Shakespeare as a complex text with its heightened language. Through developing and revising their own piece of text, the reader becomes a maker of meaning, a co-creator with an author and classmates. Responsible for a single line, phrase, or word, the student is unburdened from a wall of words that can pose a challenge, in truth, to any reader. Each student has the opportunity to contribute to a larger whole and to collaborate with others in making meaning. The language is spoken aloud, embodied, and physically moved to create and recreate new meanings. Active listening is central to this activity because the students are attending to the text that is spoken. In the process, students are learning how to thoughtfully and mindfully consider texts of all kinds from their contemporary experiences as well.

Choral Montage serves as a beginning. Introduced to Shakespeare’s coded use of color, students might subsequently view performance clips to critique how particular words ring when they are embodied by actors, each bringing to their performance their own physical, and experiential, body. What does it mean, for example, for an actor of color to assume the role of Macduff in this passage? What does it suggest if an actor of color portrays Macbeth, surrounded by a predominantly white cast? What coloration and meaning is revealed in the text when, in our classrooms, students embody these lines?  As pathways into the discussion and performance of a troubled early modern text, questions like these help students see and read their own world as well.^[9]

There are other pathways for students to explore their identities through Shakespeare. The Chicago Shakespeare Slam is, a high-school poetry-slam festival comprised of teams from CPS and private, parochial, and regional schools. Students meet in their own schools to plan, devise, and rehearse. Teams prepare two performance pieces: a Shakespeare scene that they have adapted only by cutting; and a scene each team creates by sampling from a Shakespeare play and a second text of their choosing (a novel, screenplay, poem, song lyrics, historical document, etc.). They develop a devised scene about a subject of particular interest to them—from parental divorce, school shootings, and the oppressive isolation of the pandemic to thriller spoofs, dating apps, and a presidential debate send-up. The Slam community gathers for workshop days, regionals, and the Final Bout on Chicago Shakespeare’s mainstage.

Since Bard Core’s first cohort proposed the formation of an alumni group (which they named Hard Core Bard Core), we continued to meet over the summer for curriculum development, peer support, and camaraderie. Twenty years later, Hard Core Bard Core periodically gathers alumni for training, support, and peer learning. It is these relationships that form the foundation of much of the education program’s evolving programming serving the diverse students of CPS.

While Bard Core was initially developed in response to a request made by CPS leadership, throughout the years the program’s staying power has been ensured not by administrators but by teachers. This grassroots approach unquestionably has sustained Bard Core through frequent leadership and curricular upheavals at the district, local-network, and school levels. It is teachers who tell their colleagues about Bard Core. It is Bard Core teachers who have subsequently been named department chairs and, with other alumni on their team, revised an English Department’s approach to teaching Shakespeare—and to literature in general. It is Bard Core teachers who have advanced into school administrative positions and shared on a broader scale with colleagues. In recent years, we have proudly welcomed a second generation of teachers to Bard Core who recall their own teachers participating in the program—and returning to the classroom each week with new ideas.

By creating room for diverse authors, genres, and approaches to student learning, Bard Core nudges Shakespeare from that spotlight on center stage where he has stood for so many years in the English curriculum. By engaging our classes in active meaning-making, the resulting stage picture can only be enriched by its new variegation, a study in contrasts that will deepen students’ capacities to think critically and engage authentically with these complex and troubled texts.

Appendix 1

View JPG | Download PDFSee pages 320–21

Appendix 2

View JPG | Download PDFSee page 322

Appendix 3

View Part A JPG | Part B JPG | Part C JPG | Part D JPG | Download A–D in a PDFSee pages 323–27

Bibliography

Appleman, Deborah. Literature and the New Culture Wars: Triggers, Cancel Culture, and the Teacher’s Dilemma. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2022.

Brown, David Sterling. “The ‘Sonic Color Line’: Shakespeare and the Canonization of Sexual Violence Against Black Men” in The Sundial (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, August 2019).

Dadabhoy, Ambereen, and Ruben Espinosa. Interview by Farah Karim-Cooper. “How Whiteness Dominates the Study of Shakespeare.” August 20, 2020. In Such Stuff. Produced by Shakespeare’s Globe. Podcast. https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/blogs-and-features/2020/08/20/suchstuff-s6-e2-how-whiteness-dominates-the- study-of-shakespeare/.

Thompson, Ayanna, and Laura Turchi. Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016.

Wilhelm, Jeffrey.  Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension: Role Plays, Text-Structure Tableaux, Talking Statues, and Other Enactment Techniques That Engage Students with Text. New York: Scholastic Professional Books, 2002