Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose

Ayanna Thompson, Laura Turchi

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 his plays as fixed, determined and dead. This resource shows teachers how to approach his works as vehicles for collaborative exploration, to develop intentional frames for discovery and to release the texts from over-determined interpretations. In other words, it reveals how to teach his plays as living, breathing and evolving texts.