David's Learning Outcomes

Long, boring wall of text after the jump.



1. Gain Shakespeare Literacy
I think this class really helped me with my Shakespeare literacy. I've already taken a couple Shakespeare classes and attended several plays, but I felt like we really expanded on my knowledge in this course. I was exposed to several plays that I hadn't read before, including, most notably, The Merchant of Venice. A couple other plays I hadn't read before were A Winter's Tale and Henry V, both of which were awesome. I also examined one particular play (again, Merchant) in very great detail, and I was able to do a lot of study on its legacy. Again, I had previously attended several plays, so I thought I had that aspect of Shakespeare literacy down pretty good. That said, I also enjoyed the performances we saw.

2. Analyze Shakespeare Critically
This semester, I did a lot of very fruitful analysis of both textual features and context. For my first paper, I analyzed names in A Winter's Tale, and did a fair amount of textual analysis, pointing out the symbolism inherent in many of them. My Merchant paper was almost entirely contextual analysis, in which I analyzed the history surrounding different productions of the play. However, I kind of struggled with application of literary theories (although I briefly debated writing about deconstructionism for my big paper, it didn't go very far beyond that) and applying digital mediations. I had a bit of a hard time using the internet, which I'll describe shortly.

3. Engage Shakespeare Creatively
This is another area I thought I struggled in. The closest, I thought, that we came to creative work was writing sonnets at the beginning of the semester, but I thought that experience was more frustrating than enlightening (iambic pentameter is hard!). This experience helped me appreciate a little better the process of writing poetry, but it's not something I plan to continue. Aside from that, I don't think we did much creatively (outside of our formal writing, which required a kind of creativity) this semester.

4. Share Shakespeare Meaningfully
This was the outcome I think I did best with. I talked about Shakespeare with a diverse audience this semester, including my stepmom, my roommates, my coworkers, and my friends. I also shared my sonnet with my FHE group, as well as my facebook friends. For the most part, these interactions were pretty simple--things like "Let me tell you about this quote!" or "What do you think about this Shakespeare topic?" Although several of these sharing experiences resulted in little more than a "That's... nice," I felt that I helped to share several of my insights with a wider audience that might not have experienced them otherwise.

5. Gain Digital Literacy
This semester definitely helped me with my blogging skills. I've been online since I was a teenager, but I've never actually written for a blog, which requires a different set of skills than I ordinarily use. I now have a much better idea of how to write a blog, and how to write for the internet in general.
I also got a little more experience searching social media and that sort of thing, and I've been exposed to several tools that I'd never even heard of. In my case, though, I thought this was less helpful: I did most of this social media stuff to prepare for my paper, and, due to my very specific, specialized topic, I wasn't able to find very much online. I could see how this could be a valuable tool for another project, but, again, my topic was so specific that the best help I was able to get was from fellow scholars that were at least partially familiar with my topic.