A new collection of essays written by Shakespeare educators and published by ASU’s Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies offers teachers fresh frameworks and critical approaches for exploring Shakespeare through an anti-racist lens. Edited by educational researcher Dr. Laura Turchi, the collection “provides options to teach, even celebrate, Shakespeare’s works without exacerbating bardolatry and alienating students.” Turchi argues that while discussions at the intersection of race and Shakespeare may seem far-reaching to some educators, “Shakespeare’s works support a critically aware, anti-racist classroom.” She goes on to say that while conversations about Shakespeare and race may generate discomfort in both students and teachers, that friction is more necessary now than ever. “Given persistent censorship and misinformation efforts that demonize critical race theory and diversity, inclusion, and identity initiatives,” Turchi writes, “and states like Florida and Texas banning schools and libraries from offering texts that include racial history and literature, educators need access to the designs offered in this book.”
We at myShakespeare agree with Turchi’s sentiment and found this collection to be profoundly helpful for thinking through these nuanced concepts at an especially urgent moment in history. Here, we outline some key themes and actionable takeaways, but you can also read the full text for free here.
Reckoning with Whiteness, Race, and Power in Shakespeare
Through the research and experience of leading Shakespeare educators, Design and Discomfort delivers a mandate that teachers grapple not only with race, but with the presumption of Shakespeare’s modern relevance. The authors of “Infusing Race and Other
Identity Markers in Secondary-Classroom Study of Shakespeare” argue that “instruction can promote problematic depictions when Shakespeare is taught without troubling the assumption that the value of his works rests on their relevance due to the universal ‘human experience’.” Mary Janell Metzger adds that, given the overwhelmingly white demographics of the American teaching force, educators must make an intentional and informed decision to build anti-racist community in their classrooms, especially when it comes to Shakespeare. “The study of racialization in Shakespeare,” Metzger writes, “which is to say the historical production and power of whiteness via the representation of darkness—allows students to analyze historical, literary, and theoretical work that can profoundly inform their understanding of the context of their own lives.”
In her essay on decentering Shakespeare, Marilyn Halperin highlights the value of collaborative teaching strategies such as the Choral Montage—a student-centered activity that “equip[s] students with tools to explore Shakespeare’s racially charged language.” In her anecdote, students are tasked with putting a passage from Macbeth in conversation with a transcript from Shakespeare’s Globe podcast on how whiteness operates in the plays. They discover that, “Shakespeare’s play, within a few short, damning lines, attributes the monikers of villain and devil to ‘black Macbeth.’” Drawing on the work of Ambereen Dadabhoy, Halperin asserts that we “‘take seriously those moments in Shakespeare where race comes up,’ that we no longer view this playwright as ‘a transcendent figure without race, without gender, without politics.’”
Halperin is among many contributors who acknowledge that discussions of race in the classroom can be challenging to navigate. The positionality of the teacher and the demographics of their students present unique obstacles and opportunities. As Sasha A.J. Maseelall writes, “To address racial proximity is risky because it calls for trust and reciprocity,” adding that “we must do the work of opening ourselves to teaching with love.” Contributors from the Folger Shakespeare Library argue that tension can be mitigated when Shakespeare is humanized and his work is not immediately presented as sacrosanct. They call on educators to “Give up Shakespeare worship,” adding, “If your Shakespeare lives on a pedestal, take him down and move him to a space where he can talk to everyday people and great writers like Toni Morrison and Julia Alvarez, Frederick Douglass and Joy Harjo, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Azar Nafisi, Amy Tan and George Moses Horton, Jane Austen and Pablo Neruda, and James Baldwin and Homer.”
Centering Student Identity and Voice
Another prominent theme in Design and Discomfort is the call to center student identity and provide opportunities for learners to exercise agency in the classroom. Folger contributors urge teachers to “Amplify the voice of every single student, [leaving] space for students to bring their whole selves to the process of reading, analysis, and learning.” Highlighting the importance of bolstering student confidence, they add “Shakespeare has something to say to everybody, and everybody has something to say back to Shakespeare. Student voices, both literal and figurative, are essential to this work.”
Teaching artists Chris Anthony and Peter Howard contribute an interview-style conversation where they share their strategies for centering student identity. “Instead of asking how our community fits into the Shakespeare play,” Anthony says, “[we ask] how the Shakespeare play fits in our lives. Where is the point of connection? How is this a play about a really important issue in the lives of young people?” Anthony also speaks to the culture of genuine interest in student voices she has witnessed through her work at Will Power to Youth, an arts program facilitated by the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles. “One of the things that classroom teachers would say to me after their students had done Will Power,” Anthony shares, “was ‘I can tell that they’ve been listened to. I can tell that they have been in a place where adults valued what they had to say.’”
Mary Janell Metzger takes this concept further by advocating for a culture of active listening and empathy between students and their peers. One classroom tenet she has successfully implemented reads, “Speak from your own experience, never those of others, and avoid generalizations about other people. Avoid comparing your personal experience with that of others or rationalizing or justifying—as opposed to explaining—your position.” These communication skills go a long way in facilitating a culture of care and creating space for critical discourse. Sasha A.J. Maseelall echoes this sentiment, setting expectations for emotional intelligence in learning spaces when she writes, “Teaching is a relational exercise. True reciprocity is impossible without cultivating authentic relationships in the classroom.”
Designing Inclusive Curriculum
By repositioning Shakespeare—through pairing with other texts, modifying the curriculum, or designing for cultural responsiveness
—educators invite students of all backgrounds to the once elitist Shakespeare table. Reflecting on her teaching strategies before encountering the culturally sustaining frameworks of educators such as Django Paris and Ghouldy Muhhammad, Melina Lesus writes, “I was providing the opportunity to critique but not necessarily the opportunity for criticality. I was focusing on the texts but forgetting about the world.” One remedy for this narrow approach is the addition of companion texts from diverse authors. Maseelall writes, “Repositioning Shakespeare in concert with other texts dismantles problematic rhetoric about Shakespeare’s universal appeal; it invites my students and me—us—to grapple directly with Shakespeare’s language and to discuss its particularity alongside the particularity of other complex languages.”
In their essay on poetry in the Shakespeare classroom, Jesus Montaño and Kathryn Vomero Santos discuss the value of employing young adult verse novels by writers of color to inspire student appropriation of Shakespeare texts. ReVerse-ing, as they call it, focuses on “the playful and artful deployment of words in the creation of meaning,” encouraging students, “to become meaning-makers in the service of gaining personal agency and, by their poetry, to become agents of change in educational and societal practices.” Making space for this kind of linguistic creativity and experimentation empowers students to recognize the rhetorical skills they already possess—a realization that can be especially resonant for students who employ culturally specific slang or speak English as a second language.
Another strategy promoted throughout the volume is multidisciplinary professional development and collaboration. The writers of “Infusing Race and Other Identity Markers in Secondary-Classroom Study of Shakespeare” explain, “Partnering with other teachers is ideal—even (or perhaps especially) across subjects, grade levels, and schools—as teachers can share expertise, assume creative leadership roles, and engage in opportunities for professional growth with peers.” Halperin adds that professional development emphasizing nontraditional approaches to Shakespeare can free educators to think more creatively about their lesson design. Speaking to the practice of cutting a play—or choosing to omit sections of the text in order to delve more deeply into significant passages—Halperin notes, “Teachers gain ‘permission’...to use both cutting and selected portions to plumb more deeply. In our experience, cutting Shakespeare is one of the most effective ways to engage an audience—be they seated in a theater or classroom.”
Building Anti-Racist Community
In addition to recommendations for antiracist and culturally sustaining pedagogy, contributors to Design and Discomfort also offer specific teaching strategies that foster accountability, inclusion, and interdependence. Several educators featured in this volume advocate for theater-based learning to engage students in the text and embody the events and emotions of Shakespeare’s plays. Athanases, Houk, Sanchez, and Cahalan explain, “Drama-based pedagogy (DBP) frames such activity as dynamic classroom practices for student engagement in exploratory, reflective literacy work across disciplines, without the intent to formally perform them as theater-type activities.”
One such activity uses playing cards to explore power dynamics and “attune [students] to ways characters’ disparate statuses impact their behavior and interactions”. In the activity, “students are dealt a card from a standard playing deck, which they do not look at but hold face outward to their forehead as they walk around the room. The card’s value determines their ‘status’ (ace the lowest), and students interact with one another to guess their own place in a status hierarchy by how (un)deferential their classmates are towards them, before debriefing and reflecting on the activity as a class.”
Other contributions outline strategies for approaching difficult themes like race and power. In “Using Caste to Talk About Difference,” Ana Christensen makes the case that the concept of caste can be a helpful onramp in supporting student understanding of power stratification and how it applies to Shakespeare’s plays as well as our modern world. “The concept of caste,” Christensen writes, “allow[s] students of all backgrounds to find pertinent connections between early modern forms of oppression and the social hierarchies that they witness today. Our pedagogy need not be ahistorical or presentist in its effort to invite students to make relevant connections across history.” Through the opening scenes of three Shakespeare plays, Christensen outlines how students might be prompted to explore social hierarchy and division through Shakespeare.
In “Casting and the Classroom,” Ofir L. Cahalan calls for deeper engagement with casting choices when screening Shakespeare performances in the classroom, writing, “requiring students to watch a performance with a diverse cast is not enough to produce more inclusive Shakespeare pedagogy: we also need to attend to how and why productions engage the identities of their casts and critique the implications that accompany casting decisions.” Calahan argues that Shakespeare casting offers a rich place to engage students in discussions of race and identity: “By encouraging students not only to attend to casting practices but to critically analyze them as well, we invite a deeper awareness of the semiotics of race. Students are often eager to explore questions of identity in the classroom, and casting presents an opportunity to do so.”
In “Talking Back to the Bard through Words, Visuals, Gestures, and Sounds,” Wendy R. Williams advocates for multimodal composition projects that create opportunities for students from marginalized communities to “draw on their cultures, languages, and experiences as they grapple with complex literary texts” by creating “spoken word poetry, comics, collages, raps, zines, short films, and more.” Williams makes the case that “Shakespeare’s plays are themselves multimodal works,” adding, “A performed play combines linguistic, audio, visual, gestural, and spatial modes. Making sense of these works therefore requires attention to these different modes.” Multimodal assignments are frequently mentioned as a means to foster student agency, because “students need opportunities to talk back to texts through forms that are meaningful to them.”
Kristine Wilber’s honest take acknowledges the very real challenges that educators face, writing, “The culturally sustaining and celebratory pedagogy required for helping students with ‘conscious deliberate lives’ is a whole lot harder than we discuss and admit.” Despite the discomfort, innovation, and stamina required to implement and maintain creative and culturally sustaining approaches, the educators and thinkers in this volume agree that all students deserve an approachable, enjoyable, and dynamic experience of Shakespeare. Through the application of these frameworks and lesson designs, Shakespeare educators in diverse classrooms everywhere can bring these classic plays to life in a way that is not only skill-building, but deeply meaningful to their students.
