In both literature and composition, my teaching is informed by my commitment to make the learning a communal experience. I firmly believe that writing and literature matter only and precisely because they initiate a conversation between writer and reader. As a teacher, I strive to involve my students in this discourse; I encourage them to provoke their readers with their writing; and I equip them with the competence and confidence to respond critically to the writing of others. In my teaching of Shakespeare, my students and I confront writing from a variety of genres in an effort to analyze the differences in rhetoric, authorial intent, as well as reader response. Class discussion, group work, and collaboration are vital to my approach to teaching.  top

As Henry James so eloquently remarked, “Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon exchange of views and the comparison of standpoint.” The awareness that literature is an art that feeds upon the exchange of ideas and that learning is a joint effort informs all interactions in my classroom. My teaching thrives upon mutual respect, the students’ ability to disagree with each other respectfully and upon their willing and respectful negotiation of differences. Everybody in the class has something to contribute. I am the facilitator who uses her role as the teacher to glean and redistribute this knowledge and the individual experiences my students bring to class. I guide and referee my students, informing their discussion with factual foundations and leading them towards a common, mutually respected and acceptable goal. In the context of the Shakespeare course, this means that my students talk for the majority of the class period, while I listen and respond to thoughts and issues they raise. In order to focus and facilitate this exchange of ideas and their reading of Shakespearean plays, I equip them with discussion questions a day ahead of time. At home and independently, my students have to begin thinking about the reading critically. In class, we share our thoughts and responses and discuss how and why we arrive at these interpretations. Respect for each other’s approaches governs this effort. top

Above all, I would describe my approach to teaching as subtle. I believe in the students’ ability to engage intellectually with a text and to do so independently and competently; I prepare them for this encounter, provide them with sufficient background information to locate the text within a socio-cultural milieu, and supply them with the tools and the willingness to associate with the authors and the fictional world they create. In a 300-level course, I seldom interfere actively because I trust that students not only desire independence, but also deserve my respect. In addition to the guided class preparation in form of discussion questions, my students have an independent and voluntary assignment that allows them to lead discussion in directions they would like to explore. For every meeting, they are encouraged to conduct research into something that intrigued or confused them in their reading of a play. Quite often, this exercise enables them to respond to their peers and explain points other students had trouble understanding but did not think of researching themselves. To me, the advantage of this approach is two-fold: they learn from each other and they resent, at least momentarily, that somebody else in the classroom—somebody other than the teacher—knows more than they do. Typically, this leads them to prepare better next time around. top

It is very important to me that students feel responsible for the success of the class, but I also need them to remember and feel comfortable to turn to me for guidance. While I place a strong emphasis on class participation and an active engagement with the plays, I also emphasize my role as the resident expert—the one they can call upon when in doubt. In order to keep that as unobtrusive as possible, I collect and comment on the optional projects in the same way that I respond to their discussion questions, adding my own ideas to theirs, suggesting search tools, and recommending sources for further research. By the same token, I encourage my students to relate to their reading actively. By supplementing our reading with contemporary analogies, suggesting ways in which they can relate to the reading and feel what the writer felt, the characters experience, and history prescribes, I lead them towards a private and unique understanding of the various plays. All learning, I believe, must consist of a gleaning of knowledge and a gaining of comprehension that is immediately followed by the application of this insight and understanding, first in one’s own life experiences and then within the context of the literature. top

 When reading King Lear, for example, my students customarily have problems finding a character to which they can relate. They think of Lear as an extortionist, Edmund as an ungrateful opportunist, Regan and Goneril as deceitful liars, and even of Cordelia as little more than a stubborn child. All of these responses are normal and defendable on some level, but all are surface truths only, typical immediate reactions to the play and its theater of fallible human beings; none of these definitions, however, holds up to closer scrutiny. Role play is a simple but rather effective way by which one can channel, diffuse, and, ultimately, inform such sentiment. Dividing the students into small groups and assigning them individual characters, I encourage them to formulate arguments and to defend their position in front of the other groups, each group representing another character in the play. Personally invested in the fate of these characters, students, quite effortlessly I might add, find plausible explanations and identify possible motivations for their actions; they come to understand that the characters’ actions are, in fact, comprehensible and even logical, but most importantly quite natural and entirely human.  top

And this leads me to another focal point of my approach to Shakespearean drama. I strongly believe that drama needs to be experienced. One cannot expect to read a play and walk away “knowing” it. And this, I’m afraid, is the greatest obstacle especially to the teaching of Shakespeare. Everybody has read Shakespeare; almost all of the students have read at least Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in high school; and most students are convinced they know these plays. But they don’t. They have only scratched the surface and absorbed some of the most common misperceptions. Calling Hamlet indecisive, for example, and then moving on to the crazy Ophelia, firmly convinced that one has exhausted one’s interpretive options, is detrimental to an understanding of the complexity of Shakespeare’s writing and the intricacies of his heroes’ character. In order to know Hamlet, we need to see and hear him; we need to experience what he experiences, but we also need to comprehend how early moderns experienced the play and what they expected of Hamlet. top

Besides learning about Renaissance history then, performance theory and praxis play a vital role in my teaching and my efforts to guide my students towards an understanding of the complexities of Shakespearean drama. Since class time is limited but performance experience is so very fundamental, we customarily meet in the evenings once a week and watch a Shakespeare production together; sometimes this might be a theater performance, sometimes a film adaptation of a play, and sometimes a loose cinematic interpretation of a play, such as Scotland, PA or “O”—to name only the two most popular amongst my students. During the movie and the next day in class, we discuss the interpretative choices actors and directors make as well as examine our own reactions to these interpretations. After a viewing of Kenneth Branagh’s adaption of Henry V, for example, our discussion took a distinct turn towards the relationship between Henry and Katherine. We talked about the difference between the emphasis in the movie and the impression we had taken away from a reading of the play.

Some students felt that Katherine was portrayed as too passive and submissive in the play, and this then led us to discuss the role of women in the Renaissance in general and royalty more specifically. By the same token, the movie inspired an exploration of the importance of Katherine’s efforts to learn English. We talked about the power language and the significance of this passage in relation to an increase in vernacular literature during the Renaissance. Latin no longer connected Europe; it had been replaced by a desire to communicate in the vernacular and connect people by nationhood rather than education. Katherine’s conscious effort to learn Henry’s language can thus be read in regards to revealing her understanding of him; by the same token, his attempts at speaking hers might help us understand Shakespeare’s portrayal of the soldier king, a man capable of abandoning his friends for the sake of his country, wooing a woman he has already legally conquered, and roaming a military camp at the eve of battle, all the while spreading “a little touch of Harry in the night.” top

 In my teaching, I always emphasize the various interpretive approaches and try to demonstrate at least a few in class discussion. Besides assisting them in the reacquisition of early modern perspectives then, I also guide my students towards sounding their own experiences against the ones we encounter in our reading and encourage them to analyze their own beliefs and motivations critically through the screening of literary texts and their cinematic representations. The greater the discrepancy in their backgrounds, the more enriching the discussion tends to be. To me, one of the most important elements of teaching is making the text matter to students. It is my job as a teacher to initiate this discussion, to allow for experiments, to arouse curiosity, to vary the approach, and to facilitate “the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.” Leading students slowly and carefully into the realms of literature, showing them how to interact with the text as well as teaching them how the text interacts with the world around it are essential in making the classroom an experience to them that broadens their horizons and opens their minds. At the end of the semester my students have come to understand that literature influences our lives as no other media does or ever will. top