Holistic Shakespeare

Debra Charlton

Description

The standard analytical approach to teaching Shakespeare does not tend to help students understand the theatricality of the Bard’s plays and can leave them with an overly dry, disconnected view of Shakespeare. Designed to address this problem, Holistic Shakespeare combines analysis with creative learning methods. Holistic Shakespeare acts as a guide for teachers as well as enabling students to feel as if they are in the stands of the Globe Theatre actually watching the play. This book is designed to explain the methodologies and values of the holistic educational model, which is directed toward whole-brain, integrated, and experiential learning that motivates students to think deeply about the interlinks between what they learn in the classroom and the significant moral and ethical questions that impact their everyday lives. Further, in the holistic Shakespeare classroom, application of these foundational concepts opens up a fertile pathway that leads students toward a more intimate understanding of how Shakespeare thought—about himself, his relationships, and his environment. In holistic education, WHOLENESS (or holism) describes an integrated curricular approach that places value on the complete learner and cultivates every student’s unique potential to become active, thinking, and caring contributors to the larger world. Holistic Shakespeare embraces the text’s definitive status as a theatrical script, making performance-based activities an indispensable instructional tool. Like the exciting creative buzz that pervades the rehearsal room, the holistic learning environment is active, process-oriented, cooperative, and exploratory, which restores true ownership of the educational journey to the place where it belongs—in the hands of the student. Performance-based teaching has reinvigorated the Shakespeare classroom in recent decades.

Chapter I: Thinking Like Shakespeare

 

Chapter II: Stages of Green: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

 

Chapter III: The Morality of Power: Measure for Measure

 

Chapter IV: The Rhetoric of Hate: Othello

 

Chapter V: Art, Science, and Mysticism: The Tempest

 

Sujets

• Public Policy
• Sign Language
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Performing Arts
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• EDUCATION
• Lettres et linguistique
• Idioma inglés
• Theatre
• General officer
• English
• LAW
• General
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 03 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781841506814
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2012 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2012 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Persephone Coelho
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Jessica Mitchell
Typesetting: Planman Technologies
ISBN 978-1-84150-471-1
eISBN 978-1-84150-681-4
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Thinking Like Shakespeare
Chapter 2: Stages of Green: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Chapter 3: The Morality of Power: Measure for Measure
Chapter 4: The Rhetoric of Hate: Othello
Chapter 5: Art, Science, and Mysticism: The Tempest
Resources for Further Learning
Bibliography and Materials for Additional Study
Glossary of Terms
Preface
In his book, Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players , acclaimed director Peter Hall predicts that within 200 years, Shakespeare “will only be faintly visible—rather as Chaucer is to us. … He will soon need translating” (2003, p. 10). Distanced by centuries of cultural, linguistic, and educational change, modern teachers of Shakespeare face formidable challenges as they strive to help their students discover meaningful connections between 400 year-old canonical plays and the pressing concerns of an increasingly complex twenty-first century world. Conventional desk-bound instructional methods, centered primarily in left-brain thinking, can heighten these barriers and stifle appreciation of the plays’ vigor, beauty, and sustained relevance.
This book is designed to overcome these obstacles by drawing on the methodologies and values of the holistic educational model, which is directed toward whole-brain, integrated, and experiential learning that motivates students to think deeply about the interlinks between what they learn in the classroom and the significant moral and ethical questions that impact their everyday lives. The content and exercises in this book, which are equally applicable and pertinent to either literary or theatre classroom settings, combine analytical and intuitive learning approaches to foster personalized growth of the whole student. Regardless of where each student’s educational comfort zone might lie, he/she is encouraged to immerse fully in both performative and academic activities, shedding inhibiting self-labels along the way.
Many colleagues have lent their professional and personal encouragement during the writing of this book. My gratitude goes to Dr. John Fleming, Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Texas State University-San Marcos, for his generosity and unfaltering guidance, and to my colleague, Dr. Charles Ney, a fellow Shakespeare enthusiast who has been an encouraging and insightful faculty mentor throughout this process. I also extend deep thanks to Patricia Delorey of the Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training, my teaching partner in the Texas at Stratford Shakespeare intensive, and to our gracious host-facilitators for the program, Dr. Paul Edmondson and the staff of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust at Stratford-upon-Avon. Through their passion and curiosity, my students push me to constantly reassess my own ingrained assumptions about classroom Shakespeare, and I relish all that they continue to teach me. Finally, I dedicate this book to my daughters, Ashley and Olivia, for their patience and support.
Introduction
S hakespeare and his contemporaries perceived man’s mind, body, spirit, and environment as inextricably interconnected. This holistic mindset, the foundation of scientific and medical thought during the Renaissance era, profoundly influenced art and literature throughout the period and supplied the ideological cornerstone of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. In the modern classroom, recapturing this lost holistic viewpoint offers an invaluable resource for encountering Shakespeare’s plays with greater depth, clarity, and authenticity.
Three intertwined concepts made up the fabric of holistic thought during Shakespeare’s lifetime: Wholeness, Interconnectivity, and Embodiment. Borrowed, adapted, and refined from classical and medieval philosophies, this triad of holistic values comprised one of the most significant theoretical influences on Shakespeare’s stagecraft. Collectively, these core tenets, which Shakespeare absorbed from earliest childhood, indelibly colored his perspective on the world in which he lived, while providing the wellspring for his creation of character and situation, and sustaining the ethical systems that underpin the fictional world of the plays. These seminal values, which are discussed in greater depth in Chapter 1, also support the framework for the holistic curricular approach outlined in the ensuing chapters. In the holistic Shakespeare classroom, application of these foundational concepts opens up a fertile pathway that leads students toward a more intimate understanding of how Shakespeare thought—about himself, his relationships, and his environment.
In holistic education, WHOLENESS (or holism) describes an integrated curricular approach that places value on the complete learner and cultivates every student’s unique potential to become active, thinking, and caring contributors to the larger world. In contrast to conventional curricular approaches, which locate primary focus on the learner’s acquisition of formulaic essential knowledge and skills, the holistic educational approach draws upon the rich resources of intuition, memory, sensation, and imagination as channels for personalized discovery. Of course, time-honored analytical and critical tools are not discarded; instead, within a supportive and exploratory classroom community, students are encouraged to engage in the constant interplay between cognitive polarities. Like Shakespeare’s dramatic language, which fluctuates between restrained, highly patterned rhetorical structures and unpredictable, impassioned syncopation, the holistic Shakespeare classroom stresses the plurality of teaching strategies necessary to convey content and facilitate communication of the expressive meaning of Shakespeare’s multilayered plays; instructional techniques that target students’ analytical reasoning skills are deliberately juxtaposed against those that favor subjective, individualized responses, and experiential activities that motivate freeform creative play are balanced by those that foster introspective contemplation. Students learn to practice wholeness through both inner reflection and collaborative activities that enhance personal and transpersonal awareness. By accentuating the unity of the complete learning organism, the holistic model invites students to become adaptable, fluid, and self-aware learners, who are open to experimentation and not intimidated by the unfamiliar.
Holistic education is, by nature, value-based and student-centered. It is concerned with nurturing the whole learner, not just when he/she occupies a seat in the classroom but also when he/she ventures beyond the classroom doorway. Naturally, all skilled and compassionate instructors recognize that learners lead complicated lives both inside and outside the school walls; in their daily lives, every student grapples with significant, often daunting, ethical challenges. However, traditional educational models, which concentrate almost exclusively on the intellectual life of students, provide inadequate footholds to bridge the gap between classroom and real life growth opportunities.
Holistic learning promotes students’ moral intelligence, without privileging any single value system. It fosters growth of the WHOLE learner—intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual—by:
• Training students to think deeply about the world they inhabit and to develop heightened sensitivity to humanitarian values.
• Honing the aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual skills students need to become active and compassionate global citizens.
• Motivating learners to translate classroom discoveries into real-world situations and actions that will bring positive change to society.
• Inviting students to unpeel layers of meaning and pose questions about the “why” of learning: Why is this content significant to my life? What can it teach me about the ways in which I engage with others? How does this knowledge contribute to my understanding of the natural world and the greater human community?
Early in their public schooling, most students are quickly immersed in atomistic, rather than holistic, educational settings (Pask and Scott 1972; Svensson 1984). Atomistic (or mechanistic) curricular approaches tend to break content down into small parts made up of isolated facts and details. Learning objectives are often heavily slanted toward boosting scores on standardized tests, while contextualization is virtually ignored. Atomistic teaching shifts emphasis away from the needs of the individual learner in favor of regimented instruction geared toward the memorization (but not retention, application, or true understanding) of limited, particular content.
In America, an upsurge in emphasis on atomistic teaching was one inevitable byproduct of educational “reforms” of the 1980s and 1990s. During those decades, student outcomes became increasingly tied to government funding, with scores on achievement tests becoming artificial, but hotly pursued, indicators of student, teacher, and institutional success. Today, “teaching to the test” has become the residual fallout of this fixation on test scores, which has led to oversimplification of content by instructors, excessive use of short-te