Megan Isaac
Elon University
English

“Cudgel thy brains no more about it”: Shakespeare and Performance Centered Learning

Learning on My Feet

The best learning experience I have ever had in regard to Shakespeare occurred in a National Endowment for the Humanities Teaching Seminar more than a decade ago.  For six weeks, twelve English professors, twelve Theatre professors, and fourteen professional actors worked together to learn about three of Shakespeare’s plays. 

A great deal of our work centered on “vertical interpretation”—which is to say we were on our feet most of the time, not sitting around the classroom in chairs.  We took on roles and worked out what lines meant, then what speeches meant, and sometimes even what whole scenes meant.  We arranged ourselves for a scene, tried it out, and then heard what textual specialists, directors, and actors all thought about our interpretation. 

Often, we did it again in a brand new way based on our newly discovered deeper understanding of the relations among the characters and the words they spoke—or didn’t speak.  Despite already having spent years studying Renaissance drama, that summer was a revelation for me.  My goal in teaching has been to find ways to replicate in my own classrooms that opportunity for revelation.

Research Question

All kinds of pedagogical materials in Shakespeare studies encourage teachers to think about ways performance can be used in the classroom; it is not a new idea.  My central question for this project asks not how to use performance, because that is something I am already fully committed to, but instead it seeks to discover what students learn about Shakespeare from performance centered interpretive activities in the classroom.

Performance centered activities take up a great deal of time, and the decision to spend 30 minutes on one small scene instead of ripping through an entire act might be easier to make and justify if I could better articulate and demonstrate exactly what kinds of learning are enhanced by these sorts of pedagogical practices.

Understanding the kinds of learning that occur is, of course, only the first step.  I also want to know how to strike a balance between performance-centered activities and other pedagogical approaches, whether students are able to transfer what they learn through performance to other parts of the text they haven’t performed, and a host of related questions.  But, I am trying to begin at the beginning by asking, “What do students learn during performance activities?”

A Range of Experiments

During the 2008-2009 academic year, I experimented with performance centered activities in four different courses:

• a traditional Shakespeare course 

• a 3-week condensed term Shakespeare course 

• a survey of Early British literature

• a Medieval literature course

This variety of teaching assignments enabled me to experiment with implementing performance centered activities in different ways.  In two of the courses, interpretation through performance was a regular part of the class.  Students worked in groups on different performance based assignments with nearly every play we studied.  In other courses, students participated in only one performance based activity during the term.  Consequently, I have collected a variety of data that includes information about related issues like group dynamics, the value (and pitfalls) of repetition, and the ways student confidence increases over time as well as about the activities themselves.

Varied Activities

I employed a variety of performance centered activities all aimed at enabling students to explore how drama can be interpreted.  Some activities had clear and precise goals—as when I assigned a scene with a textual crux and asked each group to find some way to solve it through their interpretation.

For example, what happens to the vial that held the sleeping potion after Juliet drinks it in Romeo and Juliet?  Having the nurse discover it or Juliet’s mother or Juliet’s father or no one at all changes the scene significantly.  Students discover new possibilities about the relationships among the characters in the play by making a decision about how to stage this scene and by watching the decisions the other groups in the class make.

As the course progressed and students grew more comfortable with their groups and more efficient at producing interpretations, the activities I assigned to the groups grew more complex, and I allowed the groups more freedom to choose their own pieces of text with which to experiment.

Sample Activities

Here are brief descriptions of some of the activities assigned to the interpretation groups. To keep the activities manageable, most of the time groups were limited to working with no more than 100 lines of text.

• each group selects and performs its own set of 100 lines

• each group performs the same set of 100 lines chosen by the instructor

• each group performs the same set of lines chosen by the instructor, but receives different instructions about a character or emotion to emphasize

• each group chooses a set of 100 lines and translates them into modern dialect

• each group chooses a long scene and abridges it to about 100 lines without employing modern dialect (students cut lines from the scene rather than rewrite them)

• each group is assigned an entire act and abridges it so that the whole class can perform the entire play in about 20 minutes

• each group writes a new scene of 100 lines to insert into the play at some point in order to solve a plot problem (but without changing the outcome of the play)

• each group writes a conversation of 100 lines among several characters from different plays to illustrate a theme

More Work

I collected data in my classes through pre- and post-class surveys as well as by asking students to write narrative reflections about their experiences with performance activities at several points during the term.

Since I implemented this project in four different sorts of classes that enrolled a total of about 120 students, I gathered quite a bit of data.  But since I never taught the same course twice during this project, my data is broad rather than deep. Consequently, I will be repeating my study in two classes (Shakespeare and Early British Literature) during the 2009-2010 academic year.

Although exploring group dynamics was not an original goal for my research, it ended up being one of the things I learned the most about.  Developing methods to ease student fears about social loafing and inequity in group assignments became an important part of my research and my teaching as the year progressed.  Now that I have a clearer idea of how group dynamics can both enable and undermine the sorts of performance activities I want to study, I will turn my focus back toward an exploration of how and what students learn about drama by using interpretation groups and performance.

Student Comments

I had expected to find some resistance among students in my courses to the extensive use of interpretation groups due to anxiety about performance (even low stakes, low pressure performance).  Instead, I discovered most students were concerned about group dynamics. Comments from one set of surveys collected during the first week of class are representative:

• Groups hurt because you have to rely on others and you can only hope that others will be responsible. (Student A)

• I find that I feel more productive on my own because I have had too many group members slack off, forget, or miscommunicate. (Student B)

• Occasionally, a group will hinder my learning by becoming bogged down by technicalities . . . or by that one slacker member who’s hard to get along with. (Student C)

By the end of the course, however, students expressed a different attitude toward groups as a vehicle for learning:

• I feel that the interpretation groups do help with the reading.  It is not so much that it allows me to understand the play better, but rather see it in a different light.  . . .  The way that the groups all made different choices shows the many ways to perceive Shakespeare’s writing. (Student A)

• The interpretation groups are very helpful.  It provides an opportunity not only to see the pieces in action, but to observe differences in how they can be played . . . . It is also good to have many people to talk over a scene with. (Student B)

• Seeing how other groups interpret and stage scenes gives me a better idea about how a character might be presented.  For example, one group’s Hamlet was quite funny, where I originally read the scene as only serious.  I’ve found it really interesting to see how one change to a character in one scene affects the rest of the play. (Student C)

Time is of the Essence

Although I knew time management would be crucial as I began experimenting with interpretation groups in my classes, I learned that success often destroys the most carefully delineated schedules.  Performance activities that succeed in producing enthusiastic response and discussion from students require tremendous amounts of class time. 

It is easy to tie up an activity and move on when student enthusiasm flags or a quick point has been emphasized, but when students seem to be pushing their own boundaries and pulling more out of the activity than I had aimed for, it is hard to insist that we conclude and shift to other activities or topics.

Figuring out ways to manage performance based activities so that everyone participates (as both a performer and an audience member) and leaving enough time for discussion and reflection was my greatest challenge during the first half of the year.  Although I improved my time management skills in regard to the interpretation groups as the year went along, it remains a struggle.

The Domino Effect

As I should have anticipated (but didn’t), this research has also affected my teaching in a number of tangential, yet positive ways.

Since I find the responses of the class to performance activities so much more dynamic than they are to many of our typical class discussions, I find myself rephrasing and rethinking how I present material to draw on the performance activities.  Instead of asking students, “What do you think about X?” as a way to initiate a discussion, I find myself asking “How would you demonstrate X through performance?”

I have also made changes in the essay exams and paper assignments for my courses in an attempt to capitalize on the enthusiasm students have demonstrated in their performance groups.  When I initially designed this project, I thought of it as a method to increase student engagement in the classroom; now I think of it as a strategy to increase their engagement in out-of-class elements of the course as well.

Rigorous Fun

As I refine how I change my courses to make better use of performance groups, I am considering how to help students see that a rigorous class and a fun class are not mutually exclusive.

The enthusiasm students demonstrate for interpretation groups and performance activities still seems, all too often, to evaporate when faced with a writing assignment. Although it is entirely predictable that students will find writing less entertaining than developing an interpretation of a scene with peers, I’d like more of the inventive creativity demonstrated in the performance groups to show up in written assignments.  Too many students who articulate and demonstrate thoughtful interpretations in class seem to fall back on stolid, vague, or unimaginative views of drama when they begin writing.

Inspiring students to transfer their insights and enthusiasm from one activity to another will be one of my challenges as I continue to study how interpretation groups can affect how students learn about drama.