If We Shadows Have Offended
Bring some thespian magic to your classroom with these resources!
Welcome to From the Teacher’s Desk, where we take turns further reflecting on our episodes and applications to the classroom.
I’m pretty sure one of the first lessons we’re taught as potential English teachers is that Shakespeare is hard.
Your kids aren’t going to like it.
Brace yourself for complaining.
But I never bought it. Because just like we say here at Lit Think all the time, good stories are timeless. Across the boundaries of genre and generations, stories worth studying should still speak to us.
The real challenge is figuring out how to get your students to see that as well.
Why Acting?
My whole understanding of how to approach Shakespeare in the classroom changed when I was exposed to the Folger Method. (Seriously - these people put on some of the best sessions for teachers every year at NCTE. I can’t recommend them enough!) The whole premise of this teaching idea is that any text is approachable if you give students space to interact with it.
This is why we do our students a disservice when we ask them to read complex texts like Shakespeare in isolation. As the movie Hitch reminds us, 90% of human communication is body language and tone. When we give these tools back to our students, they can more easily crack open the foreign language they perceive in Shakespeare.
What Kind of Acting?
Of course, you’ll feel like you’ve won the English teacher gold if you can get your kids to actually act out scenes together. But what I love about the Folger Method is that it points out that ANY kind of interaction with complex texts can feel like acting.
Get students to read famous quotes from the play in different tones (anything from sleepy to sarcastic).
Encourage students to toss a ball back and forth while reciting pieces of dialogue between two characters (I made this one for Frankenstein).
Or spend a whole class period unpacking one important passage with an activity like this one from Folger: Iago’s Web of Lies in Act 2.
The Encyclopedia Britannica defines acting as, “the performing art in which movement, gesture, and intonation are used to realize a fictional character…” And this type of work can really help bring literary texts to life in the classroom.
Other Acting Resources
If you want to go all-in, there’s a lot of fun to be had in using a scene workshop as your summative assessment (like this one).
I usually broke mine down into three main steps:
A student-written paraphrase of the scene’s lines
Director’s notes to their specific character in the scene
The physical acting of the scene
This combined the important work of language analysis and physical application, both of which are crucial to really understanding Shakespeare well.
But I can’t say it enough. Sarah and I love theater as a medium because of how it helps us transform and dream as humans. Any small part of that magic you can share with your students in a classroom setting will go a long way!
Chapter 4.5 - Thespians in the Wild
Listen now (39 mins) | Alicia and Sarah combine their love for theater and satire in their discussion of the indie film mocumentary Theater Camp. They look at the history of mocumentaries, their personal love for theater and theater experiences, and the role of satire in producing effective media that takes on the form of fake documentaries. At the end of this week’s discussi…
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Love this. I used to split Mercutio's Queen Mab speech into parts and assign groups to act them out by pantomime. It was less intimidating than acting out, say, the balcony scene, and helped immensely with comprehension. I miss teaching Shakespeare!