Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach

Turchi, Laura,Thompson, Ayanna

ISBN 10: 1472599616 / ISBN 13: 9781472599612

Published by The Arden Shakespeare, 2016

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach
• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1472599616
• ISBN 13: 9781472599612
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Authors

Ayanna Thompson is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, USA. She is the author of Blackface (Bloomsbury, 2021), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars (The Arden Shakespeare, 2018), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach (The Arden Shakespeare, 2016), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (2011) and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (2008).

Laura Turchi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Houston, USA.