Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach

by Ayanna Thompson, Laura Turchi

What does it mean to teach Shakespeare with purpose? It means freeing teachers from the notion that teaching Shakespeare means teaching everything, or teaching “Western Civilisation” and universal themes. Instead, this invigorating new book equips teachers to enable student-centred discovery of these complex texts.

Because Shakespeare's plays are excellent vehicles for many topics -history, socio-cultural norms and mores, vocabulary, rhetoric, literary tropes and terminology, performance history, performance strategies - it is tempting to teach his plays as though they are good for teaching everything. This lens-free approach, however, often centres the classroom on the teacher as the expert and renders Shakespeare's plays as fixed, determined, and dead. Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose shows teachers how to approach Shakespeare's works as vehicles for collaborative exploration, to develop intentional frames for discovery, and to release the texts from over-determined interpretations. In other words, this book presents how to teach Shakespeare's plays as living, breathing, and evolving texts.

Genres: Shakespeare, Education, Teaching

192 pages, Paperback

First published February 11, 2016

Reviews

[Diz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book focuses on teaching Shakespeare in high school. It promotes the use of close reading and analyzing texts with frames. If you are a high school English teacher, you can probably get a few ideas for your classes.

[Peaches · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the concepts of divergent paths to knowledge as well as the concept of teaching the text in engaging ways instead of something to trudge through. When I taught high school, I loved teaching Shakespeare because of resources I had that showed me innovative ways. I laughed at the part where it talked about using the standard Shakespeare's life PowerPoint because that used to be me too. I do think, however, the techniques were less innovative than I anticipated.

[Helen Mears · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book very useful as it focuses in on the age group 14-19 and it gives excellent advice on devising assignments that will stretch learners of that level.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great academic resource for how and why we should teach Shakespeare.