Teaching Literature at Key Stage 3 and 4

Drama

Approaches to Shakespeare
Starting points

There are many possible starting points when working with student teachers on Shakespeare. One simple option is to allow student teachers in groups to discuss the question: why teach Shakespeare? Such a question tends to provoke discussion that exposes the potentially problematic nature of Shakespeare's privileged status in terms of curriculum and assessment. Student teachers' responses to the question can be compared with the list produced by Rex Gibson as part of the Shakespeare in Schools Project (Gibson, 1998).

An alternative and equally profitable starting point is to explore the student teachers' histories by asking the question: what does Shakespeare mean to you? With large groups of student teachers, the responses are many and varied, and that is part of the point – an acknowledgement of difference, of different histories and different reading positions. It should be fundamental to any work with texts, of any kind and in any medium, that no reader is a blank slate, no reading happens ex nihilo. Clearly student teachers should be encouraged to adapt this approach when introducing Shakespeare to a Key Stage 3 or Key Stage 4 class. Similarly, in the context of a particular play being studied, student teachers may be asked what they already know about, say, Macbeth, and again, encouraged to take a similar approach with their own pupils.