DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Megan Isaac

English

Elon University

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Learning on My Feet


The best learning experience I have ever had in regard to Shakespeare occurred in a National Endowment for the Humanities Teaching Seminar more than a decade ago.  For six weeks, twelve English professors, twelve Theatre professors, and fourteen professional actors worked together to learn about three of Shakespeare’s plays. 

A great deal of our work centered on “vertical interpretation”—which is to say we were on our feet most of the time, not sitting around the classroom in chairs.  We took on roles and worked out what lines meant, then what speeches meant, and sometimes even what whole scenes meant.  We arranged ourselves for a scene, tried it out, and then heard what textual specialists, directors, and actors all thought about our interpretation. 

 

Often, we did it again in a brand new way based on our newly discovered deeper understanding of the relations among the characters and the words they spoke—or didn’t speak.  Despite already having spent years studying Renaissance drama, that summer was a revelation for me.  My goal in teaching has been to find ways to replicate in my own classrooms that opportunity for revelation.

 


Research Question

All kinds of pedagogical materials in Shakespeare studies encourage teachers to think about ways performance can be used in the classroom; it is not a new idea.  My central question for this project asks not how to use performance, because that is something I am already fully committed to, but instead it seeks to discover what students learn about Shakespeare from performance centered interpretive activities in the classroom.

Performance centered activities take up a great deal of time, and the decision to spend 30 minutes on one small scene instead of ripping through an entire act might be easier to make and justify if I could better articulate and demonstrate exactly what kinds of learning are enhanced by these sorts of pedagogical practices.

Understanding the kinds of learning that occur is, of course, only the first step.  I also want to know how to strike a balance between performance-centered activities and other pedagogical approaches, whether students are able to transfer what they learn through performance to other parts of the text they haven’t performed, and a host of related questions.  But, I am trying to begin at the beginning by asking, “What do students learn during performance activities?”

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

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DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.