Letters To Ej-- Please Teach Shakespeare In Middle School

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Dear Mr. Roberts: Please Teach Shakespeare in Middle School
I read with interest Mike Roberts's essay, "Dear Mr. Shakespeare: Please Stay out of My Middle School English Class!" (Sept. 2008, 102-04), in which he urges middle school teachers to keep Shakespeare out of their classrooms because students are not ready to read and understand the Bard's work. More than 25 years of Cartier Replica performance-based teaching strategies and activities developed by teachers participating in teaching Shakespeare institutes in Washington, DC and around the country have demonstrated that even young students can understand and appreciate Shakespeare's work, and all Mr. Roberts has to do is give them the chance to do so.

For many years, teachers have been approaching Shakespeare's plays using a performance-based teaching method first introduced at the Folger Shakespeare Library's Teaching Shakespeare Institutes. Performance-based teaching is an interactive approach to the study of literature, particularly Shakespeare's plays and poems, in which students ...
... participate in a close reading of the text through intellectual, physical, and vocal engagement. Thou-sands of teachers, many of them working in elementary and middle schools across the country, have gotten their students up on their feet speaking Shakespeare's language, and the result has been overwhelmingly positive for students, their teachers, their communities, and district test scores. In Washington, DC alone, the Emily Jordan Folger Children's Shakespeare Festival will mark its 30th year next spring. This festival brings together hundreds of students in Grades 3--6 who perform from Shakespeare's plays during a week-long celebration of Shakespeare's writing.

Mr. Roberts writes that teachers need "to properly teach students how to read and value Shakespeare rather than simply have students read him because they 'can.'" The point of teaching Shakespeare in school should not be just to have students read his plays, but rather to experience his plays by getting on their feet and speaking the lines out loud. Students work with their teachers and peers to make meaning of the words. Students and their teachers use the words as a guide to movement on the stage and therefore provide a key to their meaning. With their teachers to guide them, rather than to tell them what they should know and what it all means, students will discover Shakespeare for themselves in elementary and middle school, and they will bring those discoveries with them to each reading of the plays they are assigned, and to each performance of the plays they see, not just in high school and college, but throughout their lives.

The Folger Shakespeare Library is not alone in this thinking. Recently, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in England published its "Stand Up for Shakespeare" manifesto as a direct result of students reporting that they found Shakespeare "boring" and "irrelevant." The RSC has developed a program to train teachers to introduce the works of William Shakespeare to grade-school students by getting young students up on their feet, something the Folger Shakespeare Library has been doing since 1983.

Another point that Mr. Roberts makes is that students should be reading YA novels instead of Shakespeare's plays. Why not both? What better way for middle school students to see the staying power of Shakespeare's plays, and the influence he has on contemporary writers, than to have students make those connections between the novels he cites and the plays that Shakespeare wrote?

Lastly, Mr. Roberts writes that change is difficult. Perhaps the change that is difficult to make has less to do with keeping Shakespeare out of Cartier Replica Watches the middle school classroom and more to do with asking teachers to allow students the freedom to get up on their feet and to speak Shakespeare's language "trippingly on the tongue."

Editor's Note: See the upcoming September 2009 English Journal, which is themed "Teachers Set Free: Folger Education and Other Revolutionary Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare."