Active Shakespeare: How do active approaches contribute to Shakespeare teaching and learning at Key Stage 4?

This thesis set out to gain a richer understanding of how active approaches contribute to wider Shakespeare teaching and learning in the secondary school context. Studying Shakespeare’s plays is compulsory, and an examined part of secondary education in the UK. Theatre companies suggest exciting ways to teach Shakespeare in the classroom, including the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) active approaches, which see the teacher become a director in the classroom and use theatre workshopping to engage students as if actors. Active approaches are rooted in process drama, using dramatic activity to experience a play, characters and ideas in a live, dynamic and interactive way to make meanings which are co-constructed. Three relevant theoretical lenses emerged in the literature review, and were used to examine the active approaches in the study: dialogic, embodied and creative pedagogies. The study used an interpretivist case study methodology of a teacher in a school in England, with her year 10 (16-year-old) class as she embedded active approaches within her own practice. Data collection included lesson observations, photographs taken during lessons, and transcribed photo elicitation interviews with a student focus group, and separately with the teacher, during a teaching scheme of Macbeth. The data was analysed with a ‘see-think-wonder’ approach, and open coding, before constant comparative analysis at an axial coding stage, leading to a final selective coding. A number of themes emerged as to the possible contribution of her active approaches: active students (the way student interaction with the text is encouraged through embodiment); pluralities and possibilities (the nurturing of multiple ideas in lessons); teacher as director (the different moves the teacher needs to make to facilitate the success of active approaches); augmented understandings (the ways active approaches enhance understandings); and finally disruption (the ways assumptions and habits are challenged by the approaches). Overall, the study found a need to recontextualise the notion of teacher as director, within the complex work of teaching; in doing so, the active approaches demand teachers impose constraints during these lessons, and these can become enabling. The teacher’s active approaches were seen to unlock independently derived understandings and interpretations, as they provided lived interactions with the text, opened portals of experience, and nurtured shared, collaborative meaning making; ultimately, embodiment was central to students’ emerging thinking. The study is significant in stressing the need to embed active approaches within a wider Shakespeare pedagogy to augment the students’ emerging knowledge and assist its organisation. This has implications for how the RSC and others work with teachers to develop their active approaches within, rather than instead of, wider teaching repertoires in the future.