Overcoming
the Common Complaints of Teaching Shakespeare to Secondary Students through
Alternative Teaching Practices
“To
be, or not to be; that is the question” (Hamlet 3.1.58). Well, that may have
been the question for William Shakespeare, but in today’s modern classroom,
when students hear that the next unit their class will study is Shakespeare,
their questions range from, “do we have to?” to “why do we have to study
something so old?” or even “Can I just drop out of school now?” While this last
question is a little extreme, our students make a valid point: the plays of William
Shakespeare present a challenge to the reader, regardless of their level of
prowess. Even teachers find themselves saying to their classes, “Let’s just get
through this, please!” (Tabers-Kwak 69). How then, do we as educators, get past
the inhibitions our students hold with Shakespeare, our own reservations of the
Bard and find a pain-free, possibly even enjoyable way, to teach these plays
which, unarguably, contain some of the richest language in all of the English
language?
As
with any predicament, we cannot accurately prescribe the solution without a
clear understanding of the problem. In this case, the issue stems from the
question what makes Shakespeare so overwhelming and difficult for students and
educators alike? In my research I have run across several complaints lodged by teachers
and students against Shakespearian material. Among the myriad of reasons were these
statements:
·
“He’s too hard […] Shakespeare? Boring!
His work isn’t relevant to my world.” (Tabers-Kwak 69).
·
“One of our constant challenges with […]
Shakespeare, is to foster active learning” (Robbins 65).
·
“Students complain about having to read
Shakespeare because they do not understand the language” (Hett 94).
·
“Most teachers do not have the class
time necessary to perform the entire play; develop supplemental learning
activities; and discuss the language, meter, humor, themes, and symbolism of
Shakespearean drama” (Bowman 88).
·
“Most [students] have never seen a live
drama or comedy in a theater” (Shosh 71).
·
“My belief [is] that adolescents are
incapable of appreciating Shakespeare and might develop a lifelong aversion to
the plays if forced to analyze them too early” (Milburn 74).
·
“How…do learning disabled (LD) students,
especially those with language deficits, learn and perform the work of
Shakespeare, the most elusive and challenging text of all?” (Johnson 45).
·
“Asking students to engage in a…process
[a project relating to Shakespeare] for my viewing pleasure alone [is not]
appropriate or fair” (Bucolo 51).
Each of these educators
poses valid concerns to the logistics of teaching Shakespeare in the secondary
school setting. In summary, the 7 major roadblocks of teaching Shakespeare to
middle school, junior high and high school students are: lack of relevance to
the modern students, language comprehension, time constraints, lack of exposure
to drama as a genre, lack of ability to understand mature content, teaching to learning
disabled students and, concerns regarding audience. How do we overcome these
legitimate concerns?
In my research the
answer to each one of these plights can be addressed under the heading of
non-traditional approaches to teaching Shakespeare. Each of the authors I
encountered exhorted his or her reader to steer clear of traditional methods of
breaking down every line, writing traditional literary analyses or research
papers. Instead they advocated for the incorporation of methods including use
of technology, art, music, drama and other mediums not traditionally associated
with the English classroom. While I argue that each of the seven common
complaints of teaching Shakespeare can be overcome by applying non-traditional
methods of teaching in our classrooms, for the purposes of this paper I will
focus in-depth on only four of these: lack of relevance to our students,
language, time constraints and audience.
Complaint 1: Lack of relevance to the
modern student
The
book, Teaching Literature to Adolescents,
refers to the generation of students now in the secondary schools as ‘the
millennials’ and rattles off the following statistics about this age-group
including:
·
10% of all U.S. families…have incomes
below the poverty level
·
9%...are headed by single parents
·
15% of people over the age of five have
a recognized disability
·
20% [of people in the U.S.] speak a
language other than English at home
·
By 2033, it is estimated that half of
all U.S. children will be minorities
·
Teenagers spent an average of 12.5 hours
online per week
·
Teens and tweens watched 11-12 hours of
television per week (Beach 20-21)
From these staggering statistics, it is evident that the
world of a ‘millennial’ reflects a very different set of norms than the generations
that came before them. It is no wonder teachers of these earlier generations
struggle to relate to their students, let alone relate the literature of 16th
century to them. How can we as educators bridge a gap that spans more than 400
years?
Bob Ives, a teacher from Texas, has developed one method
for overcoming this great divide which he affectionately dubbs the
‘Shakespearience.’ In his class he had students act out a Shakespearian play,
which required not only class time, but also quite a bit of time outside of
school. He believes that, “the experience works for three reasons: it is
student-centered, it is collaborative, and it is experiential” (Johnson 46). In
other words, the students are allowed some choice and control in their learning.
By allowing our students choice and control in projects they are more willing
to engage, because they will naturally work the assignment into something that
is more interesting, and thus more applicable, to themselves and the lives that
they live. When they feel they have more control in how they will be assessed,
they work harder to prove that their alternative methods are every bit as
worthy as traditional analytical papers or tests. Little do they know that all
we want is for them to be thinking critically about Shakespeare and doing their
best in the first place. The vehicle students use to achieve this aim is simply
a means to an end.
Matthew Ratz, another English teacher dedicated to
overcoming Shakespeare’s lack of relativity to modern students’ lives, decided
that the vehicle he would use for teaching his students was through literary
circles and that, within this vehicle, he would focus on having a
student-centered learning experience. In this unit he also had students
complete a MySpace profile as well as a soundtrack for the work of Shakespeare
they were studying. Each of these activities, music and social media, were
things that students willingly engaged in during their daily free time and so
Ratz simply redirected the use of these resources in a way that allowed his
students to bring the world of Shakespeare into their own sphere. Ratz
described how he:
noticed
that these creative, artistic projects…helped lessen students’ anxiety about
performing in Shakespearean English, because they had other opportunities to
demonstrate their knowledge in more immediate, culturally relevant, and
creative ways. Using an element of students’ popular culture has a positive
tendency not only to increase engagement, but also to improve ‘buy in’ of
course content. (Ratz 44)
Using mediums that students are more familiar with are
excellent ways to show them that what they are doing outside of school has
relevance in the classroom which helps them get excited about learning more on
the subjects we present to them—they ‘buy in.’ The same logic that governs the
free market governs our classrooms—if we are unable to sell our product, we
must either change our market or change our product, and since we cannot change
who we teach, we must then change what we teach, or at least how it is
packaged.
There is a myriad of resources available for teachers to
solve the problem of relating the text to the student. Art, social media,
blogs, music, chat rooms, graphic novels, and films are just a few of these
amazing non-traditional methods that can really bridge the gap for our
students. A few articles that are full of great ways to utilize technology specifically
geared toward the teaching of Shakespeare are “Shakespeare Is Alive and Will in
Cyberspace: An Annotated Bibliography” by Dorothy Hett and “Shakespeare, Our
Contemporary: Using Technology to Teach the Bard,” by Cindy Bowman and Brendan
Pieters. Both of these amazing articles are found in The English Journal. However, if teacher decides to implement
technology in his or her classroom as a means of bridging the
Shakespearean-student gap, the most important thing to be aware of is that:
technology must support
student learning, build a community of learners, and create strong
teaching/learning networks…We need to view technology as a means of collecting
information, capturing ideas, and making meaning where students summarize,
synthesize, evaluate, select, reject, listen, read, organize, interpret, talk
write, edit, and revise. Technology is all about integration and finding
connections, inspiring critical literacy. (Bowman 89)
Sometimes there is a tendency for teachers to incorporate
technology for technology’s sake alone. No teacher enjoys the moans and groans
created by assigning another research paper and it can be tempting to try and
spice up your curriculum, as well as boost your overall approval rating, with
the implementation of a fun and ‘hip’ activity that holds little educational
value. This kind of meaningless task can do little in the way of helping our
students think critically about literature and should be avoided. However, with
a little extra thought, effort, and time spent searching the web, it is not too
difficult to find meaningful ways to use any technology in the classroom.
At the end of his literary circle unit, Ratz asked his
students to reflect on the activities and overall experience during their study
of Shakespeare. To his relief he found:
Not
only did students state that they enjoyed the unit, but also many said it was
the first time they enjoyed reading any work of Shakespeare…they loved the
freedom of choice, the constant input they were asked to provide regarding the
format of the unit, the creative assessment options, and the overall structure
of the class. (Ratz 44)
Because he was able to
include technology and non-traditional teaching methods into his lesson plans
in a way that also fostered critical thinking, Ratz found that he was
successful in his aims as a teacher and that his students had also enjoyed the
process—a win, win!
In short, the key in helping our students to overcome
their perceived beliefs that Shakespeare simply cannot resonate with their
modern lives, is found in being unafraid to use technology and other mediums
that the students are already using on a daily basis and then, using thoughtful
parameters, repurpose them to aid student learning.
Complaint 2: Language
Comprehension
Once we have managed to get our students
past their original aversions to Shakespeare and convince them that they will
find meaningful messages within his texts, the next big barrier in helping students
gain an understanding of Shakespeare is the language. Shakespeare is known
worldwide for writing some of the most complex literature of the English
language, but his messages are worth the work and as teachers we have to find a
way to help our students navigate these challenging waters. Specific challenges
regarding language include, unfamiliar and archaic vocabulary, words with
original meanings different from the meanings they possess today, strange
sentence constructions, obscure allusions, and emphasis on rhetorical tropes
that are not prevalent today. Each of these makes it difficult for any reader, and
especially for our students, to interact with Shakespeare’s texts.
Johnson states, quoting B.A. Mowat and P. Wernstein from
the Washington Square Press that, “all readers of Shakespeare, ‘need to develop
the skills of untangling unusual sentence structures and of recognizing and
understanding poetic compressions, omissions, and wordplay’” (Johnson 46). To
help students ‘untangle’ these syntactical knots, Johnson says, “the key lies
in understanding the play, the characters and motivations, rather than a
word-for-word translation” (Johnson 47). It is overwhelming for students to
undertake Shakespeare if they believe they must understand every single word of
his plays, not to mention it makes the reading process incredibly slow. This is
a great place to incorporate reading strategies with our students and help them
understand that, by ‘constructing the gist’ of what Shakespeare is saying, they
are more than adequate to the task of taking on Shakespeare. Johnson also
suggests that having students learn basic “Latin roots, prefixes and suffixes”
can help students decode a larger selection of Shakespeare’s word choices
rather than creating vocabulary lists of specific words (Johnson 47). In this
way they learn to problem solve and construct a fairly accurate meaning for
unfamiliar words without the hassle of running to the dictionary for every
other word.
G.B. Harrison, a notable expert in the field of high
school drama from the 60’s, expressed a struggle he has overcome in his own
teaching which results from the evolution of words and their meanings and
explains that Shakespeare “uses words which are still common, but he frequently
uses them with different meanings and connotations. As a result we often miss
his meaning, or—what is more exasperating—we produce a perfectly good sense
which was not what he meant at all” (Harrison 411). Imagine the student who
agrees to ‘buy in’ to our Shakespeare unit, writes a compelling argument, only
to find that the phrase he or she has based his or her entire argument upon
actually meant something completely different. With risks like that, no wonder
our students get frustrated before they begin. To circumvent situations like
this Harrison suggests a couple of things, the first is more preventative in
nature; he urges teachers to carefully consider their choice of text based on
the grade level and maturity of the students we are teaching. For students with
little or no experience with Shakespeare’s works he suggests the plays Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night. Both of these plays are rather uncomplicated in
terms of plot and in comparison to Shakespeare’s other play, are far simpler. Harrison’s
next suggestion is the consideration of studying the plays “in translation”
(Harrison 411). There are tons of resources available that simplify the text of
Shakespeare and make it easier for our students. The “Shakespeare Made Easy”
library is one such tool. This publisher prints the original text of the play
on the left side of the page and then a simplified version on the right side.
Students are then able to follow along in class while supplementing with this
easier version as necessary for understanding. Other teachers have taken this
idea of translating Shakespeare and used it as a mode for assessment. Ideas
such as creating picture books, raps, and updated Shakespearean scenes are all
excellent ways to help our students tango with the text and re-read it multiple
times so that they understand it well enough to change it, while preserving the
original meaning (Tabers-Kwak 69). The best part is that students do not even
realize they are doing this, because they are having so much fun!
Another important aspect of Shakespearean language which
students must understand is that in his attempt to maintain rhyme and meter,
Shakespeare had no qualms about manipulating words He created conjunctions where
they did not belong, added syllables and accents to words, and made words up
altogether. Shakespeare had fun with his language and true lovers of
Shakespeare are able to recognize when he is doing this and so, for our
students to appreciate the true genius of the Great Bard, they must learn to pick
up on this too. Sarah, a colleague of Michael Milburn designed an activity to
do just this, “drawing upon Shakespeare’s fondness for witty incongruities she
asked her students to pair objects from their own lives…with unpredictable
companions” (Milburn 74). Her students loved the funny phrases generated
through this activity and, with the help of their teacher, loved picking out
places where Shakespeare was doing the same thing.
In my own experience with Shakespeare as a high school
student, I really enjoyed a Shakespearean Insult activity my teacher assigned
to the class. We got to go home and combine Shakespeare’s zany vocabulary in
hilarious ways; in fact, when I shared it with my mother, she enjoyed the
activity so much we had to leave the list on the refrigerator so we could have
it at our disposal whenever we needed a good laugh. Shakespeare’s language can
be fun and engaging if we help our students realize that part of what makes it
fun is not just being able to define every word, but simply the sounds and
cadence; language need not be a barrier to our students and by incorporating
more non-traditional activities, language can actually be a conduit for
engagement with the text.
Complaint 3: Time
Unfortunately, even if a teacher is willing to undertake
the task of teaching Shakespeare and his or her students agree to engage in the
process, all classrooms are under the proverbial time-crunch problem. How can
we possibly expect to cover Shakespeare adequately and still fit in everything
else we are required to teach in a given school year?
In an attempt to find a solution to this problem, Michael
Milburn decided rather than teach an entire play to his ninth-grade class he
would simply teach a single soliloquy and give them a basic overview of the
backstory that preceded the passage. At the conclusion of his lesson he
interviewed a few of his students about the experience and then surmised that
“while students [may not]…rush from class to acquire the play, neither would
they groan the next time a teacher mentioned Shakespeare” (Milburn 78). Milburn
was successfully able to teach these students critical skills in reading
literature using Shakespeare as an avenue for doing so. In some classrooms,
especially those filled with younger students, this can be a useful technique
for priming students for later grades where they will have more exposure to
Shakespeare without the time commitment of teaching an entire play.
Another way to alleviate the stress caused by lack of
time can be to implement the idea of literary circles mentioned earlier. Ratz
designed his unit by selecting multiple plays and assigning one to a group of
students in his class. By doing this he was able to teach 4 different plays
simultaneously, which allowed students to learn about multiple plays from their
fellow students, without actually having to spend the time reading them
themselves (Ratz Shakespearean Circles:
How a New Approach Enlivened My Classroom). This could be a great solution
for teachers who want to teach more than one play to their students, but do not
want to allot months of time to trudging through two and three Shakespearean
plays as a class.
Bruce Robbins suggests that another way to tackle the
time issue is by using what Patrick Tucker, former Royal Shakespeare Company
director, calls the ‘Original Approach’ to teaching Shakespeare. He explains
that in Shakespeare’s day, actors were often expected to perform a different
play every day and many times did not even have the time to read through an
entire play before they actually performed it (Robbins 65). Thus, the original
approach to Shakespeare would involve a similar experience where actors were
given no more than a day’s notice to perform their parts the following day. “I
could see that some of the techniques of Tucker’s Original Approach could be adapted for the secondary school English
classroom,” says Robbins, these:
techniques
reveal some interesting historical background, and they operate in a compressed
time period…I see a potentially fun, active way for teachers to help students
learn to read Shakespeare’s plays with better understand of the cues and
nuances in the language, resulting in improved visualization and understanding,
thus providing a better basis for interpretive thinking. (Robbins 65-66)
Not only does this method cut down on the class time
allotted to Shakespeare, leaving more time for other important classroom
activities, but it also teaches students other great skills for thinking about
literature that may otherwise have remained untaught.
One last consideration to help with the time issue is to
use the Shakespearean unit as an opportunity to incorporate alternative assessments
to the traditional paper method. As discussed throughout this paper, there are
many ways to test students on their knowledge of Shakespeare that are less
time-consuming than the writing process, but still allow for the same critical
thinking process to occur. These same alternative assignments can also save the
teacher time on the grading end as well. Just food for thought! J
Complaint 4: Audience
The nature of teaching a Shakespearean unit raises
several concerns regarding audience: first, that students work tirelessly
simply to perform for their peers or teacher, which seems like a letdown after
so much work; second, Shakespeare’s plays were intended for a Shakespearean
audience, which differed considerable than the audience found in a typical
secondary classroom; and third, the audience that our classes perform for are
composed of their peers, which can make even the brightest student falter for
fear of embarrassment. Each of these is a legitimate concern and must be dealt
with if a Shakespearean unit is to be taught with the upmost degree of success.
The first of these concerns is quite easily dealt with
through the mode of alternative assessment assignments. One teacher decided
that for his class, he would ask his students to produce a film similar to Al
Pacino’s Looking for Richard. Joe
Bucolo felt that by having students create this film it would make it possible
to create an audience for their finished product worthy of students’ hard work.
He had his students present their work at a fine arts festival held every other
spring in his area. “With an authentic audience in place, the project was ready
for action,” and students were much more dedicated to the task set before them
knowing that the product would go beyond the classroom (Bucolo 51). If we give
our students an audience they feel is not contrived, they are much likelier to
exert more effort in their work, and thus engage in a deeper learning
experience with the text. Venues like this for your own classroom are easily
come by with a little extra research on your part and can have a powerful
impact on your students’ experience not only with Shakespeare, but education in
general.
The next portion of this concern, overcoming the
disparity between Shakespearean audiences and the audience of our classroom, is
another area worth a bit of reflection. Some teachers try to solve the first
concern of audience by performing a play in an auditorium built for a large
audience in an even larger room. In Shakespeare’s Globe Theater “the farthest
spectator was about fifty-five feet away from the actors. As a result
Shakespeare wrote plays which demand the greatest subtlety in the acting, and
the closest attention from the audience” (Harrison 413). If we expect our students
to perform Shakespeare’s plays and give the same effect Shakespeare himself
did, then we are setting our classes up for failure and disappointment.
Shakespeare’s plays contain little in the way of scenery, props and blocking in
general. If we want our students to successfully entertain a larger, less
Shakespearean-savvy audience, slight modifications in these areas will produce
entertaining performances students can be proud of. Going one step further,
because today’s audience is less accustomed to the language of Shakespeare,
modifying the language itself may be another fantastic way for your students to
perform and gain the benefits of really ‘untangling’ the script.
Lastly, to help students overcome their fears in acting
in front of their peers, we must create a classroom community in which students
feel safe to make mistakes and to experiment with the text. It must be okay to
fail as long as real effort is exerted in this failing. Allowing students
choice in the assessment portion of the Shakespearean unit, as discussed under
the heading of Complaint 1, will also allow students to feel more comfortable
when performing or presenting their finished product to the class. Students
will naturally create productions they are comfortable with and may even feel
confident enough to step out of their comfort zones if allowed to do so without
coercion. Filming performances may also give students the confidence they need
to present in front of the class, because it is removed from the risk of
‘messing up’ right in front of their classmates and also allows for the
opportunity to do less satisfactory sections over again.
In conclusion, teaching Shakespeare to a secondary school
audience can be a daunting task. There are many risks involved and many
teachers have failed in their own attempts to stir a love of the Bard in their
students, but it does not have to be this way. Any teacher willing to dedicate
the time and effort required to research and implement non-traditional methods
of assessment and instruction can find success in teaching the works of William
Shakespeare to his or her class—and who knows, both the teacher and the class
may even find it an enjoyable feat in the process!
Annotated Works Cited Page
Beach, R,. Appleman, D., Hunds, S. & Willhelm, J. Teaching Literature to Adolescents. 2nd
Ed. New York: Routledge. 2011. Print.
This
source is a fantastic textbook that teaches prospective teachers of literature
at the secondary level great ways to go about doing so. Published in 2011, this
is a very up-to-date source in the teaching community, which is important when
entering the modern classroom. For the purposes of this paper, this source
provided some great statistics to help the reader gain an understanding of what
the ‘millennial’ generation looks like today.
Bowman,
Cindy and Brendan Pieters. “Shakespeare, Our Contemporary: Using Technology to
Teach the Bard.” The English Journal.
92.1 (2002): 88-93. Web. 13 Oct 2012.
This
article was written for the purpose of making other teachers of Shakespeare
aware of the many emerging technological resources available today. The
internet is a great resource, but often teachers are not able to realize its
full potential for their classrooms, because they simply do not know it exists.
In this paper, I felt this was a great source, because it brought up (like many
of the other authors I researched) that time was a huge constraint on what
teachers were able to fit into their curriculum, especially with respect to
teaching Shakespeare. This article then tried to help teachers overcome this by
suggesting several useful sites that can make teaching Shakespeare both fun and
educational, without teachers having to waste time trying to find the new
technologies on their own.
Bucolo,
Joe. “The Bard in the Bathroom: Literary Analysis, Filmmaking, and
Shakespeare.” English Journal. 96.6
(2007): 50-55. Web. 13 Oct 2012.
This
source was my favorite bar far. I loved this teacher’s assessment of
Shakespeare in the form of a film fostering critical analysis. I thought this
was an ingenious way ofof using alternative teaching methods to create student
interest and increased comprehension. Through the vehicle of film this teacher
was able to address both the concern of relating Shakespeare to students’ lives
and audience. I definitely plan to use Bucolo’s ideas in my future
classroom.
Harrison,
G. B. “The Teaching of Shakespeare.” The
English Journal. 52.6 (1963): 411-419. Web. 13 Oct 2012.
This
source is older source, but I thought it was valuable for the purposes of this
paper because it really outlined the same problems that teachers are still
struggling with in the classroom today. I also thought that this source did a
good job laying the groundwork of some
of the more theoretical ideas behind reasons why alternative teaching methods
would be beneficial for the classroom. This paper was also a good source for
specifically looking at why audience is a concern.
Hett,
Dorothy Marie. “Shakespeare Is Alive and Well in Cyberspace: An Annotated
Bibliography.” The English Journal.
92.1 (2002): 94-97. Web. 13 Oct 2012.
This
source was one of the many I researched that mentioned the language of
Shakespeare as the main barrier between our students and understanding. The
main purpose of this piece was to provide teachers with great resources for
teaching Shakespeare. For the purposes of this paper I put a plug in for the
sources found in this annotated bibliography. My audience is teachers and I
wanted them to be aware of the resources available to them, but without
allotting too much writing space to discussing these resources in depth.
Johnson,
Kathryn King. “Teaching Shakespeare to Learning Disabled Students.” English Journal. 87.3 (1998): 45-49.
Web. 13 Oct 2012.
I
really wish I could have gone into more depth in this paper about helping
students with learning abilities use Shakespeare as a vehicle for teaching
literacy and critical thinking. This article had some great ideas for doing
this and many of these ideas apply across the board for all students, which is
how I used this piece in this article. This article expressed several of the
common concerns as well as offered solutions to them.
Milburn,
Michael. “Selling Shakespeare.” English
Journal. 92.1 (2002): 74-79. Web. 13 Oct 2012.
This source was a little more narrative in nature, but
still really useful to my research. It contained a lot of great windows into
the mind of a wary teacher contemplating using Shakespeare in his classroom. I
really liked his idea of teaching portions of Shakespeare’s works, because this
could be a great solution to the time crunch problem. I also liked his
discussion of his colleague, Sarah, and her implementation of wordplay in the
classroom. This is a great way to help students feel more comfortable with
Shakespeare and his language.
Ratz,
Matthew. “Shakespeare Circles: How a New Approach Enlived My Classroom.” Kappa Delta Pi Record. (Fall 2008): 40-44.
Web. 25 Oct 2012.
Robbins,
Bruce. “Using The Original Approach
to Teach Shakespeare.” The English
Journal. 95.1 (2005): 65-68. Web. 13 Oct 2012.
This article focused on using a technique coined by
Patrick Tucker called “the Original Approach” to Shakespeare. This article was
great because it focused on ways to foster active learning during the teaching
of Shakespeare as well as provided an innovative way to save critical classroom
time. Using the original approach in his own classroom, Harrison was able to
teach some historical facts about the Shakespearean stage as well as help his
students engage with the text itself and I thought this activity was a really
good one to share with teachers under a time crunch.
Shosh,
Joseph M. “Wrighting: Crafting Critical Literacy through Drama.” English Journal. 95.1 (2005): 69-74.
Web. 13 Oct 2012.
This source was very different from my other sources
despite the fact that it came from the English journal as well. This article
was written from the perspective of a drama teacher teaching Shakespeare and
incorporating writing into his curriculum. For the purposes f this paper I used
this source to address the concern regarding drama as a genre.
Tabers-Kwak,
Linda and Timothy U. Kaufman. “Shakespeare through the Lens of a New Age.” The English Journal. 92.1 (2002): 69-73.
Web. 13 Oct 2012.
I
particularly enjoyed this article, because it addressed a lot of ways for
applying alternative teaching to the teaching of Shakespeare. I thought it was
a wonderful source for practical application ideas. This source also really
addressed the idea of find ways to relate Shakespeare to the lives of our
students as an avenue for inspiring learning. This was one of my favorite
sources for this paper because it had several great ideas.
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