Introduction
Laura B. Turchi
Amid seismic and even explosive political and cultural changes, young adult students, and their teachers, are hard-pressed to feel Shakespeare’s long-celebrated plays as applicable to their lives or recognizable in their world. Educators can wield many strategies to make the aged language and references accessible, and some students revel in the romance of the stage or appreciate the resonances of speeches in the rhetoric – and advertising copy – they know. But under what circumstances can Shakespeare’s works mean anything serious or valuable to student lives?
Under the weight of 450 years of Shakespeare scholarship, history, and cultural capital, teachers sometimes choose to present a singular, authoritative, and pedestal-worthy version of The Bard and demand acquiescence if not enthusiastic student response. Students get the message, even recognize that this is how school is played. This collection provides options to teach, even celebrate, Shakespeare’s works without exacerbating bardolatry and alienating students.
This volume offers other, more compelling, Shakespeare-teaching purposes; the authors use Shakespeare texts to interrogate our contemporary times and articulate the complexities of their students’ identities and communities. Specifically, these collected designs for curricula and activities draw on early modern critical race thinking and scholarship. Some propose challenging students to recognize socially constructed ideas about identity that can be traced through history, including in adaptations and performances of the plays over time. For other educators, Shakespeare plays become starting places for generative connection-making. Students discover scenes, speeches, and situations that inform how they experience more modern works or that compel them to recreate language and ideas to their own creative purposes.
With these designs come the possibility for student and teacher discomfort. Ambitious teachers welcome the risk of trying unfamiliar materials or approaches for learning, despite the possibility of student resistance or confusion. And when identity, and the realities of many and various communities, are significant to the discussion of Shakespeare, teachers have additional responsibility for maintaining safety for students and themselves. The authors here often model confidence and caution: the designs they offer must necessarily be adapted to classroom and community contexts.
Premodern critical race scholarship offers both arguments for and material to expand Shakespeare classrooms in these ways. For instance, Ambereen Dadabhoy and Nedda Mehdizadeh promote Anti-Racist Shakespeare to, “destabilize Shakespeare’s universality through the framework of racial literacy and to shake up Shakespeare’s position as the author of the human condition.” [1] Similarly, Chris Thurman and Sandra Young caution against The Bard’s persistent veneration by colonizers to the colonized. [2]
Shakespeare’s works support a critically aware, anti-racist classroom. Rather than asserting that Shakespeare’s works are universally relevant, the designs and supporting examples in this book empower teachers to guide students through old texts without discounting their contemporary lives. Shakespeare’s texts are chosen to offer historically and culturally powerful ideas ripe for interrogation.
Given persistent censorship and misinformation efforts that demonize critical race theory and diversity, inclusion, and identity initiatives, and states like Florida and Texas banning schools and libraries from offering texts that include racial history and literature, educators need access to the designs offered in this book. They also need to be prepared for discomfort.
Educational design means arranging ideas and materials, creating processes and activities, and responding to a specific, not theoretical, assembly of students. This volume advances designs for teaching Shakespeare while acknowledging the discomfort in having to re-design and re-attempt the plan, especially when talk about race and difference complicate the classroom. Spanning the context of premodern literature and the circumstances of students’ lives today, these pages are rich with teaching designs and instructional approaches that enable students to see themselves—their communities, their families, and their lived experiences—reflected in complex and seemingly distant texts.
Educators can sometimes struggle to predict which race questions will have relevance to which students, when. They may understandably fear giving up too much control by allowing class discussion to run into topics they do not feel prepared to navigate without planning. Current research on design outside of educational settings (think architecture, software, and fashion) also grapples with the intersection of a designer’s expert vision and the more prosaic realities of users and consumers.[3] Designs are sometimes beautiful only until they are deployed. Such gaps between theory and practice are familiar in education: the best instructional designers collaborate with faculty in carrying out designs that are “beautifully messy and iterative,” as they adapt to the vagaries of student interests and also to what those students actually know or need to learn.[4] Carl S. Moore and Julaine Fowlin celebrate instructional designers as “change agents who have change management skills,” a description that equally applies to the educators represented throughout this collection. [5] The designs in this volume will help educators manage a changing role for Shakespeare, where the text is a vehicle for students to learn about themselves and their worlds.
The essays in this volume together create a conceptual framework, articulating principles for anti-racist Shakespeare teaching that are supported by literary scholarship and educational research.
- Shakespeare’s works open insightful windows into human conditions, but he’s not the only authority: classrooms need many stories as alternatives, adaptations, and new ideas. Students’ perspectives, and their understanding of the world gained through their experiences, should be a valued foundation for literacy work and literary analysis.[6] As Noelle Cammon, Peggy O’Brien, and Corinne Viglietta here advocate, classrooms need to “throw out the tidy explanations” and instead engage students in making meaning through juxtaposing texts, considering the historical record, pondering illustrations and playbills, and much more. Similarly, Marilyn Halperin describes a concerted effort to take Shakespeare off any literary pedestal and into the hurly-burly of the rehearsal room, where a play is a script to be cut like any other. The teacher narratives in this volume each discuss the breadth of classroom curricula that includes Shakespeare: Sasha A. J. Maseelall describes putting Shakespeare’s plays into conversations with other texts to make space for student stories too. Kathryn Vomero Santos and Jesus Montaño incorporate verse novels that adapt Shakespeare’s plays to create a place for students to experience and experiment with the intersections of narrative, poetry, and drama.
- Direct talk about race and difference may cause discomfort, but it can be manageable in a classroom community. Teachers and students can create classroom communities that explicitly and directly address race and difference.[7] If design signifies the intentions, and the purposefulness, of teaching, discomfort at least tries to account for the risks. A 2017 review of research considered classroom conversations about race and sought to understand how and when these discussions can disrupt social and educational inequalities, highlighting the importance of “having students make connections between the discussions of race at a distance (e.g., in a literary text or a historical event) and with their own lives close-up.”[8] Chapters in this book describe teachers who choose to address difficult topics, respond to student questions, and simultaneously deal with insufficient time and resources. Teacher narratives offer illustrations for understanding how Shakespeare and race intersect in the messy dynamics of a classroom community. Chicago teachers Kristin Wilber and Melina Lesus write of their own individual, not-uncomplicated relationships to Shakespeare, and how acknowledging their own ambivalence has given their students space to disagree with a character’s perspective on love, family, or authority. In these teacher narratives, readers are privileged to gain a window on both the efforts of design and the sometimes-heartbreaking discomfort in the crucible of classroom decision-making. Here too are teacher education and professional development initiatives that ready teachers to facilitate conversations focused on specific language and potentially prickly themes.
- Students can “get” Shakespeare, and all of them deserve opportunities to do so. When students are viewed as inherently capable, their talents and interests become assets to classroom learning.[9] Educators in this volume offer extensive advice on establishing a context for teaching Shakespeare that supports student success. Mary Janell Metzger offers principles for creating and sustaining a community in the classroom that honors the perspectives of students and the capabilities they bring to collective understanding. In this setting, students can be respectfully curious about each other’s embodied experiences and learn to resist racial myths while practicing accountability for diverging opinions. Chris Anthony and Peter Howard describe the classroom community they build through theater-making. These activities help students appreciate the fun of complex language through play, giving access to Shakespeare’s texts to those who might otherwise be left behind by low expectations. As further evidence of the breadth of student capabilities, and the possibility that students are never too young for Shakespeare, Sergio L. Sanchez and Jaclynn Kiikvee describe Shakespeare for elementary-school students. They design a curriculum that provides early encounters with thematic relevance using age-appropriate excerpts to get dialogues started about social norms (returning, with more depth, as students develop). As Wendy Williams writes, creative projects can demonstrate to teachers that students are neither helpless nor without assets. Students may be more than familiar with tools for creating images or sound, or filming productions, than school settings have before allowed them to demonstrate.
- Students need critical tools to identify the ideas that seem espoused in Shakespeare and are relevant to contemporary culture. Students are capable of critical thinking about race and its historical and contemporary, personal and systemic, impact on their lives.[10] In his chapter on casting, Ofir L. Cahalan explains how students need tools to see the decisions made in creating performances. Diverse students watching a diverse cast is not sufficient: students need critical language for analyzing non-traditional casting. Ann Christensen teaches the language of caste to help students articulate different systems of ranking and separating humans, and her students become more able to question the codifications of difference. They can learn to recognize when minor or supporting characters command attention and audience sympathy through references to their social status. Marilyn Halperin’s Bard Core program specifically draws on literacy experts to ensure students gain writing skills as well as theater-making capacities. Julia G. Houk’s design teaches students to read multimodal texts such as filmed productions, developing habits of inquiry that help them articulate what images might signify or soundtracks might reinforce.
- Students need creative tools for self- and group expressions that help ensure they are not erased in Shakespeare studies. Students are capable of creative works that respond to, reconceptualize, appropriate, and adapt canonical works (like Shakespeare’s) and these creative works are demonstrations of important learning.[11] As noted above, both Houk and Williams design classrooms where semiotic knowledge and the power of creativity are essential. Through creative experiences, students can escape the idea that there is only one story to be told, one universal expression that would “speak” for generalized human experience. Students can restory Shakespeare to their own expression and purposes rather than feeling erased by claims of universal relevance that do not resonate in their lives. Cahalan similarly asks students to do their own casting and articulate their critical choices. In promoting students writing their own verse works, Santos and Montaño delineate opportunities for teachers to make space for student voices.
In the chapters that follow, readers will find that some authors lay out their designs using social science–inflected research terminology and reporting structures. Other essays provide discursive reflections on complicated teaching situations. Teacher professional development initiatives describe and share their lesson plans and other resources; literature scholars outline text analyses that can lead to productive new classroom discussions. Readers should note how the essays draw support for anti-racist teaching designs from across disciplines: equity research (citing bell hooks, Gholdy Muhammad, Luis Moll, Gloria Anzaldua, and Django Paris, among others) joins literacy expertise that insists that literature, not just skills, matter for all students (Carol Jago, Kylene Beers, and Joyce Chadwick, and more). The authors combine Shakespeare-teaching traditions from Rex Gibson and Edward Rocklin, as well as learning from each other’s works and programs, with insights from premodern critical race scholars, including Ayanna Thompson, Patricia Akhimie, Ian Smith, Kim Hall, Ambereen Dadabhoy, and Farah Karim-Cooper.
THE CHAPTERS
Part 1—Foundational Ideas for Designing Shakespeare Classrooms
1. Building Community in an Anti-racist Shakespeare Classroom
by Mary Janell Metzger
This chapter describes building classroom norms and practices as a crucial first step for teaching Critical Race Theory. Metzger identifies how the intersection of Shakespeare study with critical race scholarship enables students to see their lives and communities through perspectives newly informed by power analyses and newly attuned to injustices. What does such a classroom require? She reminds educators that they must be prepared with more than procedures for taking on challenging topics and that establishing a classroom community is necessary for students to participate fully in conversations about difference and the societal norms that assign value to different individuals. For teachers, this means a belief in the beauty and power of all students and the diverse bodies and communities they live in. Metzger identifies the normative power of the teacher who may be assumed to be a guardian of Shakespeare rather than a comrade in inquiry, enumerating the ways she deliberately builds student trust by modelling respect and curiosity. For Metzger, an anti-racist classroom requires a respect for and commitment to learning about the lives, histories, and work of people long marginalized in histories of Anglo-American culture; a rejection of shaming self or others; and a commitment of accountability to the work and each other. When studying racialization in Shakespeare, students and teachers benefit from clear commitments that normalize the discomfort of not knowing. The author’s design for collaborative inquiry is founded on the belief in student assets rather than their deficits. By nurturing student capabilities that make academic and social learning possible, Metzger seeks to help students find new depths of intellectual and expressive creativity.
2. Infusing Race and Other Identity Markers in Secondary-Classroom Study of Shakespeare: A Framework for Design of K–12/Teacher Education Instruction
by Steven Z. Athanases, Julia G. Houk, Sergio L. Sanchez, and Ofir L. Cahalan
The Center for the Study of Shakespeare in Diverse Classrooms (the Center) at the University of California at Davis offers teacher education and professional development, promoting K–12 approaches to Shakespeare and other pre-/early modern texts that trouble and interrogate moments in passages and scenes where race is made invisible and gender, religious affiliation, and immigration status too uncomplicated. The Center’s focus on teacher learning empowers educators to navigate when teaching designs are complicated by tangible classrooms full of actual students. The new curriculum encompasses both embodied, drama-based practices and text pairings. Combining historical records with Shakespeare plays, for instance, supports the analysis of Abigail Adams’s letter about Othello and the racial attitudes she expresses. Scholars are invited to engage with K–12 teachers and appreciate the opportunities for inquiry at multiple levels, lessening the distance between academic and practical ideas and supporting what the Center calls a “democracy of resources.” The Center’s design framework includes cycles of interdisciplinary dialoguing across boundaries of positions, institutions, and conceptual/practical vocabularies; design for learning, shaped by a democracy of voices and resources, including collaborators’ knowledge of texts, pedagogy, and students; arts-based and multimodal engagement for students to critically explore meaning through visual, performing, and digital arts in unbounded ways; and inquiry and innovation, including students, teachers, and collaborators in reflection, supported by data derived from practice.
3. Teaching Shakespeare Here and Now, For Real: Lessons from the Folger Shakespeare Library and from Folger Classrooms
by Noelle Cammon, Peggy O’Brien, and Corinne Viglietta
In this chapter, educators from the Folger Shakespeare Library offer model race-informed Shakespeare lessons that have been tested in classrooms across the country. These hands-on, active-learning approaches are designed to bring new scholarship into an inclusive classroom setting. Over the years innovative Shakespeare activities have been codified to become the Folger Method, and the content has continued to evolve as professional development opportunities for teachers (online and in-person) have centered on race and incorporated historical and contemporary texts to enable students to not only interpret but apply Shakespeare texts to contemporary societal issues. The lesson designs presented in this chapter include resources (slides, handouts) and step-by-step instructions. The information is specific, actionable and grounded in premodern scholarship, much of it generated by Folger Institute Fellows. Classroom goals are reinforced under the header “Here’s What Just Happened in Class.” These reviews invite teachers to reflect on how their students have participated as well as reacted to the key ideas of a session.
Part 2—Educators, Teaching Artists, and Performances that Risk Discomforts
4. Yes, We Can: Decentering Shakespeare in Our Classrooms
by Marilyn J. Halperin
The Chicago Shakespeare Theater has provided years of service to secondary-school English and theater teachers, particularly through the Bard Core program. This chapter describes teacher practices that support student reading skills and build their confidence through active, theater-based Shakespeare experiences. Powerful literacy learning is designed to incorporate experts’ work with adolescents. Students develop personal and cultural connections, as well as empathy for characters. There is an extensive design sequence presented to show how a Choral Montage exercise embodies learning about editing. This same design is then shown re-imagined to specifically address race and the whiteness that permeates the canon. Teachers are equipped to pair a passage from Macbeth (Macduff’s “testing” of Malcolm in Act Four, scene three) with a nonfiction passage, a transcript from an episode in Shakespeare’s Globe Such Stuff series entitled “How Whiteness Dominates the Study of Shakespeare,” featuring premodern critical race scholars Ambereen Dadabhoy and Farah Karim-Cooper. The long life of the Bard Core program suggests the positive legacy of investing in teacher development for student benefit.
5. Building Community on a Foundation of Shakespeare: Two Teaching Artists in Conversation
by Chris Anthony and Peter Howard
Chris Anthony and Peter Howard discuss the intense work that transforms a group of young people—outside of school, in a workforce development project—into a community able to construct and perform a work of their own, one that re-creates and responds to a Shakespeare text. Both longtime teaching artists describe how their Will Power to Youth program practices active, often physical and embodied, listening. Youth learn over time to see and hear each other with respect and without expectations of conformity to what “normal” is supposed to be. Through their Shakespeare work, participants also consider systemic expectations and oppressions that shape characters’ lives—and their own. They look at Shakespeare’s heroes, villains, and selective narration of history. They consider how Shakespeare’s heightened language and his character’s perspectives on race and difference have permeated our culture. The chapter concludes with encouragements to educators who seek to lead their students in powerful conversations, even if that means navigating discomfort.
6. An Honest Tale
by Kristine Wilber
Kristine Wilber’s teacher narrative is the first of three at the heart of this volume. She richly recounts the adolescent sweatiness of her high-school classroom and how her students astonished themselves with performances when they allowed themselves to inhabit Shakespeare’s characters. She describes the trial and error of curriculum choices and the challenge of getting students to respond when a text or an activity isn’t engaging them. Wilber invokes the magic of a lesson when students take themselves seriously and are nonetheless open to joy and fun, and she also describes the challenge of competing with phones and other distractions. She has an ally in a student teacher who joins her in the Bard Core experience at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and the two go on to collaborate on literacy and drama designs for their teaching that include making space where students can interrogate identity within liberatory art-making. They design for teaching a range of texts in addition to Shakespeare’s plays and describe student responses to Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and others. When the COVID epidemic and its aftermath defeated some of her designs, Wilber describes seeking out further educational opportunities and finding a more rewarding role as a school librarian.
7. Empowered on the Road to Empowering: A Latina English Teacher’s Reflections on Teaching Shakespeare
by Melina Lesus
Melina Lesus traces a teaching narrative as a journey from her childhood imaginative play as a teacher to her pride in her high-school prowess reading Shakespeare and on to college and becoming a teacher who mustered films, audiobooks, and other resources to make reading Romeo and Juliet possible for special-education students. She reflects on the Latinx identity she shared with most of her students and how that complicates her relationship to Shakespeare—not diminishing her determination that students would “get” it but causing her to wonder why it was so important (and why Shakespeare is placed on such a pedestal of honor). She joins Bard Core and considers her love for the plays even as she wonders about whether wanting to be good at Shakespeare was part of a determination to assimilate. Lesus describes multiple teaching strategies developed as a practitioner and then revisits these through the perspective of a graduate student working to understand culturally relevant and sustaining teaching, all the while considering whether Shakespeare as an institution can be capable of decentering whiteness. In addition to reviewing readings on education and equity important to her from her pursuit of a doctorate, she shares her conversations with professors who help her articulate her ongoing determination to put student identity at the center of her curriculum designs.
8. Many Stories at Once: On Teaching Shakespeare Within a Framework of Polyphonic Discomfort
by Sasha A. J. Maseelall
This third teacher narrative describes attending and then teaching in an independent school. Maseelall explains how she sustains her love for literature even as she builds a career teaching against and away from canonical works, insisting, as the sole BIPOC teacher, on offering students alternative stories and perspectives on human experience. Maseelall describes her teaching evolution as she and her students respond to the Black Lives Matter protests, as well as deal with the isolation of COVID. Professional development opportunities allow Maseelall to rethink her disinclination to teach Shakespeare’s plays and to begin putting them into conversations with other texts, most notably Toni Morrison’s Desdemona when she had an opportunity to teach an elective on Morrison’s works. Drawing from critical race scholarship, Maseelall urges teachers to discuss Shakespeare and race in tandem with racial representations in contemporary texts, creating a classroom that prioritizes practicing what Adrienne Meritt calls “reading to listen.” For Maseelall what matters is the “something else” Ian Smith describes, an elusive but attainable sweet spot in which kids discover multitudinous stories. She describes her efforts to teach her students to listen as readers by paying attention to mixed messages and unvoiced perspectives, and she utilizes dialectic notebooks to encourage their reflection on texts and discussions. The course challenges students to collaborate on creative final projects, and Maseelall celebrates the students who persevered in creating an original play adapting Morrison’s works to express the many stories they wanted to tell.
Part 3—Requiring Shakespeare to Do More Work
9. ReVerse: Poetry in the Shakespeare Classroom
by Kathryn Vomero Santos and Jesus Montaño
The analysis and classroom designs offered in this chapter assume that students will interact more authentically and even deeply with Shakespeare’s verse if they also have opportunities to read and write verse about contemporary experiences. The term ReVerse captures the etymology of verse, which means to turn, and in this design, the young people can turn the poetry of Shakespeare to more accurately describe their experiences. The authors focus on the Latinx experience, in and out of schools, especially in the borderlands between the US and Mexico, and honor and the language, culture, racial identity, and other dimensions of belonging that students (and their families) experience. Drawing on a rich collection of works, many written for young adults, these texts encourage students to find their own language, especially in situations where they are searching to express their identity when it is uncomfortably stretched across multiple borders. The verse novels even provide models of teaching, because in them literature teachers support young poets in the readings they assign and the poetry they celebrate, making spaces for student voices. To ReVerse is to adapt/appropriate the poetry of Shakespeare, not so much the line and meter of it as the playful and artful deployment of words in the creation of meaning.
10. Using Caste to Talk about Difference
by Ann Christensen
Drawing critically on Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling Caste, Ann Christensen considers how the idea of caste can be a more capacious term than race and class for students who are becoming attuned to hierarchies and other ways that bias about difference is used to keep some people “in their place” as the targets of discrimination. Christensen deploys caste for approaching scenes from Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and The Tempest, and points out how divisions between people (by occupation, class, and race) are reinforced by those who benefit by being higher on the proverbial ladder. Christensen offers classroom activities that focus on short, dramatic, and intense yet easily passed-over moments in the plays, passages that give students concrete ways into broader and less visible problems with hierarchy. Students interrogate hierarchical relationships, the traits of citizenship or belongingness, and intersectional complications, all with illustrations from a range of Shakespeare plays and all inviting student reflection on where they see caste—status differences including race, class, and gender—in their own experiences.
11. Casting and the Classroom: Introducing Students to the Semiotics of Race in Performance
by Ofir L. Cahalan
Reviewing recent performances and how theater companies do and do not articulate their reasons for casting in race-blind or race-conscious ways, Cahalan offers a teaching rationale that puts casting decisions at the center of instructional design for reading performances of Shakespeare. This is teaching that squarely takes on potential discomfort, as many students lack the vocabulary to engage in meaningful dialogue about casting choices, especially when those choices intersect with the actor’s identity markers like race, gender, or ability. Similarly, teachers are often uncomfortable asking students to interrogate outward characteristics like race and gender. The goal is for students to see race in Shakespeare’s plays and recognize that an actor has interconnected identities that are at work in a portrayal of a character. The teaching design augments performances so that in addition to the analysis of costume or setting, students consider the impact of a production’s choice to utilize diverse identities in a cast. Focusing on The Merchant of Venice as a text and as a filmed performance, students consider Portia and her attitudes toward her suitors as well as her relationship to her attendant Nerissa. The classroom activities move from a close reading of the scene to thoughtful consideration of the casting in a specific performance, and ultimately to students themselves casting a production and considering the conscious choices they would make in order to portray their understanding of the racial otherness experienced by the Prince of Morocco.
12. Exploring Race and Gender through Selected Excerpts from Shakespeare: Spiraling Upward from the Elementary Grades
by Sergio L. Sanchez and Jaclynn Kiikvee
This chapter offers designs for teaching Shakespeare and race and gender in age-appropriate ways to young children (grades 1–4) giving students a foundation that will deepen understanding as they mature and revisit Shakespeare’s plays later in their schooling. The point is not to teach a Shakespeare play as a whole but rather to sample excerpts that support different thematic frames. The lessons incorporate drama-based practices so that young students have opportunities to learn about key themes and experience the language without being overwhelmed. In these designs, students receive a general overview of the characters and plot, providing a context for a selected scene or speech. This chapter specifically provides ideas on how to so use excerpts to promote discussions about race and gender. Through these thematic excerpts, elementary teachers can introduce Shakespeare while addressing important issues for culturally and linguistically diverse learners in inclusive and equitable ways. Although the students are young, the topical themes are both appropriate and challenging, connecting students to ideas about gender equality, for instance, and not shying away from binaries, stereotypes about aggression, and job opportunities and career choices. As the authors note, five-to-eight-year-olds encounter normative ideas about gender in the broader culture, and these attitudes and assumptions are known to be expressed, intentionally or not, in schools. The lesson sequences presented enable students to recognize multiple perspectives. The chapter provides teachers with practical ideas to use excerpted Shakespeare texts to supplement district-mandated curricula.
13. “Where do you go and how do you come back?”: An Exploration of Socially Constructed Knowing Through Multimodal Transmediation
by Julia G. Houk
The final two essays in the collection offer complementary approaches to leading students through complex multimodal projects. In these assignments students demonstrate their close reading of Shakespeare’s works through creative digital productions. Houk describes the visual, embodied, and verbal modalities that students deploy as they explore their understanding of race and identity. Houk recognizes how secondary English language arts teachers often use video clips or recorded performances of Shakespeare’s plays to make texts more “relatable” to students. However, teachers and students need tools and processes to unpack and interpret nuances of meanings in these performances. Houk offers advice on teaching students to read multimodal texts, developing habits of inquiry that help them articulate what images might signify or soundtracks might reinforce. From this foundation, students are able to analyze elements of productions and make sense of socially constructed cultural meanings. In the unit Houk has designed, The Merchant of Venice and different actors’ portrayals of Shylock can be compared and contrasted, with students also consulting reviews and scholarship. The teacher can provide multiple mentor texts to guide their thinking about conventions and other characteristics. These projects extend the exploration of the central ideas, including anti-Semitism, Shylock’s identity as it is reduced to simply “the Jew,” and the elements of characterization different actors have brought to the role.
14. Talking Back to the Bard through Words, Visuals, Gestures, and Sounds: Multimodal Assignments that Honor Students’ Voices and Cultures
by Wendy R. Williams
Student multimodal projects not only tap into students’ creative and critical capabilities: these works also enable students to imagine themselves in dialogue with an off-the-pedestal Shakespeare, using their voices to express their perspectives on canonical works and offer a critique of their experience of society. In Williams’s design, these assignments cause students to take on literature interpretation from a place of strength because students are well acquainted with multimodalities of expression in their out-of-school passions. These assignments are designed to honor student voice, experience, and cultural knowledge. The resulting creative projects can in fact demonstrate to teachers that students are neither helpless nor without assets: they are capable and resourceful and can muster music, sound, and language, as well as dramatic expression in their productions. In addition to offering detailed ideas for supporting such creative multimodal work in a classroom, Williams reminds teachers that student opportunities for transmediation and adaptation empower them to “talk back” or re-create Shakespeare in ways that highlight oppression or injustice and can offer alternatives.
Conclusion
This collection is for—and created by—secondary-school teachers and college faculty who consider teaching Shakespeare and race a responsibility of their work. The audience for this book includes those who are new to teaching Shakespeare as well as veteran teachers who seek renewed skills for teaching race and other complex ideas about constructions of identity in literature. Higher-education faculty, especially those teaching general education courses and introductory surveys, will benefit as they expand their syllabi, revisit reading lists, or find practical applications for new scholarship. It is possible to use this book as a portal, as it showcases premier programs and resources and potentially expands the network of those who care about the intersections of teaching literature and teaching young adults.
Teachers also need to know about the community that is RaceB4Race.[12] Housed at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University, RaceB4Race is a network and an annual convening that builds connections across disciplinary isolation and champions race as a lens for investigating literature, history, and culture. The genesis of this volume was the online streaming of the RaceB4Race meeting in January 2021, where the program was entitled Education. Many of the authors here watched sessions together, responding, sharing resources, and becoming less alone. Meeting online not long after the program ended, we considered what we had learned, our shared interests in moving our classrooms and scholarship forward, and the ways our individual programs and initiatives overlapped. From these conversations, this volume emerged.
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- Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh, Anti-Racist Shakespeare, p.7 ↵
- Thurman and Young, “Global Shakespeare and Its Confrontation with Social Injustice.” ↵
- See, for instance, Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice. ↵
- Cennamo and Kalk, Real World Instructional Design, 7. ↵
- Moore and Fowlin, “A Closer Look at Instructional Design,” 13. ↵
- Research on student foundational experiences with literary analysis and their acquisition of literacy skills include Esther O. Ohito’s profiles of three anti-racist women teacher educators (“Mapping Women’s Knowledges”), James Haywood Rolling on arts education (“Making Black Lives Matter”), Valente Gibson and Deion Jamison’s “Practical Teaching Is Antiracist Teaching,” Ga Young Chung’s work on student motivations to learn during a time of Asian discrimination (“‘This Is What We Wanted to Learn’”), and Marcelle Mentor and Yolanda Sealy-Ruiz on literature teachers’ reflections on their own biases (“Doing the Deep Work of Antiracist Pedagogy”). ↵
- From 2015–2022, at least eighteen respected non-profit and largely non-partisan US educational entities used their online platforms to present checklists of advice for talking about race in a classroom. The earliest cited the election of Barack Obama as the reason this advice was useful and necessary for educators, and George Floyd’s murder made the later posts more urgent. Research by Alex B. Pratt and Jerry Lee Rosiek on narrative inquiry (“Narrative Inquiry and Anti-Racist Teaching”), Elizabeth Washington and Travis Seay’s 2024 look at cultural barriers (“Examining Cultural Barriers”), Esther O. Ohito’s writing on white silence (“The White Silence[r]”), and Richard Hall et al.’s description of decolonizing university curriculum (“Struggling for the Anti-Racist University”) provide useful examples of the challenges of effective classroom talk about race and difference. Such checklists and advice is considered far more tendentious in the political climate of 2024. ↵
- Brown et al., “Classroom Conversations,” p. 474. ↵
- See, for example, research by Abigail Rombalski on youth organizers (“Connected Literacies”), Tanya Maloney, Douglas B. Larkin, and Nusrat Hoque on teacher education and developing an anti-racist stance (“The Role of Teacher Education Programs”), and Valerie Kinloch’s 2022 presidential address to the National Council of Teachers of English (“2022 NCTE Presidential Address”). ↵
- Dianne Wellington and Amy Walker offer anti-racist teaching practices for teaching criticality in English language arts (“Reimagining Teaching for Hope and Justice”); Alexis Romero Walker uses critical media literacy for anti-racist teaching (“Using Critical Media Literacy”); and Mark E. Helmsing offers a description of a curriculum for a civics course that works against “racialized national fantasies” (“Teaching beyond Racialized National Fantasies”). ↵
- Both Houk and Williams in this volume offer extensive supporting research on student creative work and its benefits in anti-racist classrooms. Frances Vitali’s work is on documenting such practices (“Technology of Story”); and Mara Pierce and Lori Santos present an Indigenous lens for teaching art and anti-racist perspectives (“Teaching Art”). ↵
- https://acmrs.asu.edu/RaceB4Race ↵