The Shakespeare in American Classrooms project is a national network of theater and language arts educators that offers curriculum and arts-based teaching approaches that embrace youth perspectives. Students discover how Shakespeare’s works help them understand identity, diverse communities, systemic justice, and the need for action today.
About Us
What we do
Shakespeare in American Classrooms offers an urgent and innovative curriculum that illuminates Shakespeare’s text through arts-based principles, with a particular emphasis on encouraging action against bias. To re-imaging the study of Shakespeare, Shakespeare in American Classrooms draws upon The Shakespeare Center Los Angeles’ Will Power to Youth, an award-winning arts-based program that incorporates human relations work into Shakespeare production design. The Will Power to Youth curriculum raises social awareness, advances equitable values and actions, and supports pro-social youth development, especially those who are economically challenged.
Who we serve
The Shakespeare in American Classrooms curriculum is designed to empower teachers to pay attention to the voice of youth – especially the perspectives young people bring to studying Shakespeare’s works and understanding the relevance that the sonnets and plays have to their lives. Through the curriculum and professional development opportunities, teachers can become experienced in facilitating in-depth dialogue with youth about pressing issues in their lives while exploring Shakespeare’s characters, plays, themes and conflicts. After reading, enacting, decoding, and paraphrasing Shakespeare texts together, and using multiple tools (like the Oxford English Dictionary and Shakespeare lexicon), youth write and perform their own versions of Shakespeare scenes. This is a critical step to ownership of the English language and to the ultimate end of “re-storying” these texts in their own vernacular.
How it works
Lesson plans for Shakespeare sonnets and plays are designed to engage students with arts-based activities and encourage them to see the Bard’s text through the lens of modern life.
Lesson plans can be incorporated into larger units of study for a Shakespeare play or combined with companion literary or historical texts.
Teachers and students are encouraged to concentrate on selected passages and scenes.
Each lesson incorporates the potent combination of English language arts (literature and literacy), dramatic arts, and arts-based activities.
Each lesson reinforces the classroom as a community that cares about its members and learns to make meaning together.
Lessons are structured into four broad stages:
Activate connections
Notice meanings
Paraphrase together
Make art
Teachers do not have to be expert art-makers and can learn along with and from their students as they create together.
Professional Development Teaching English Language, Other Academic and Arts Disciplines
The Shakespeare in American Classrooms project systematically offers English language arts teachers and teaching artists opportunities to experience, discuss, and reflect on the activities and approaches of the curriculum in order to support adapting the lesson plans into different classroom contexts in an active, relaxed, and enjoyable environment. The typical structure of the professional development session includes sample exercises and activities and an overview of the teaching strategies and purposes included in the formal lesson plan, as well as references to the supplemental materials available and other ways that teachers can explore interpretive and arts-infused classroom actions further.
Professional development sessions explicitly guide teachers through the activities that are designed for their students while encouraging the educators to reflect on what modifications or emphases their specific classrooms are likely to require. Whether in-person, online, or on-demand through asynchronous modules, each professional development session includes (in roughly this sequence):
Introductory community-building activities that encourage teachers and teaching artists to overcome tension or hesitancy from working with new people from other institutions. From the beginning of any event, teachers are encouraged to feel the joy of learning and experiencing new ideas and approaches in a group of their peers.
Overviews to the Shakespeare in American Classrooms project, the curriculum structure (combining English language arts, dramatic arts, and the arts-based principles that frame the curriculum design), and the focus of the day’s work.
An exercise or activity that ACTIVATES CONNECTIONS and helps teachers recognize and imagine how ideas and themes from the text(s) to be examined will matter to students. Teachers are introduced to how the project uses essential questions to encourage students to begin to see the direct impact and significance of Shakespeare’s works in their own lives before engaging with the specific text.
A demonstration of close reading strategies and drama-based embodied practices that empower readers to NOTICE MEANINGS and the many interpretive possibilities of a Shakespeare text. Teachers are reminded of the many tools that students can use to gain a strong grasp of the vocabulary and references of the text.
Community meaning-making that attends to connections between what the text means and how it resonates in contemporary lives: PARAPHRASE TOGETHER. Typically small groups create word-for-word, line-for-line paraphrases of a section of the text and then compare their work to others, ultimately seeking to agree on a common understanding of the words and the broader themes or ideas they want to communicate.
Building on their shared understanding of the text and its connections to our contemporary world, teachers MAKE ART in a way that mirrors the options provided in the Shakespeare in American Classrooms lesson plans. Participants are provided suggestions for art-making as an expression of ideas through what they (or their students) create, usually collaboratively. Activities include options for creative and critical writing, enacting or adapting scenes for performance, designing or creating visual or multi-media arts, and other arts-infused ways of interpreting and responding to Shakespeare texts in ways that are relevant to students’ (and teachers’) lives.
The professional development event ends with teacher reflections on their work together and the ways that the curriculum and teaching approaches will impact their classrooms.