Teaching Shakespeare to Undergraduates, Folger Institute NEH microgrant project (2016-2017): Difference between revisions

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=== ''Micro-Grant Locations'' ===
=== ''Micro-Grant Locations'' ===
Through competitive micro-grants managed by the Folger Institute, 21 college faculty teams were awarded funds to develop initiatives that strengthen college-level instruction of Shakespeare's plays. Awarded faculty teams are headquartered in colleges and universities around the country:   
Through competitive micro-grants managed by the Folger Institute, 21 college faculty teams were awarded funds to develop initiatives that strengthen college-level instruction of Shakespeare's plays. Awarded faculty teams were headquartered in colleges and universities around the country:   
* Belmont University, TN
* Belmont University, TN
* Drew University, NJ
* Drew University, NJ

Revision as of 14:00, 30 June 2017

This page includes open access teaching resources in addition to summarizing this Institute program.

Funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Division of Education Programs, Teaching Shakespeare to Undergraduates awarded micro-grants to college faculty involved in the Folger's NEH-sponsored national tour First Folio!. The micro-grant competition challenged college faculty to leverage the energy of public outreach initiatives towards teaching strategies, resources, and objectives in a digital age. These faculty development grants also sought to summon a community of practitioners, constituted across departments in large universities and among faculty on various campuses in a local region. The program launched with a summer 2016 workshop, gathering representatives from each project, and concluded with a collection of open access teaching resource available at the bottom of this page.

Program Director: Dr. Kathleen Lynch | Program Manager: Dr. Kyle Vitale | Program Intern: Justine DeCamillis  

Micro-Grant Locations

Through competitive micro-grants managed by the Folger Institute, 21 college faculty teams were awarded funds to develop initiatives that strengthen college-level instruction of Shakespeare's plays. Awarded faculty teams were headquartered in colleges and universities around the country:

  • Belmont University, TN
  • Drew University, NJ
  • Emory University, GA
  • Florida International University, FL
  • Gallaudet University, DC
  • University of Hawai'i, HI
  • Kansas State University, KS
  • Mary Baldwin College, VA
  • Cleveland State University, OH
  • Texas A&M University (College Station and Corpus Christi), TX
  • Tulane University, LA
  • University of Arizona, AZ
  • University of Colorado Boulder, CO
  • University of Connecticut, CT
  • University of Iowa, IA
  • University of Louisville, KY
  • University of Minnesota Duluth, MN
  • University of Oregon, OR
  • University of South Dakota, SD
  • Wayne State University, MI
  • Wheeling Jesuit University, WV


A map presenting the location of micro-grant and First Folio! sites can be found here.

Awarded projects included regional conferences bringing flagship universities and local colleges into conversation; new websites featuring teaching modules, digitized exhibitions and archival materials, and modern performance archives and hyperlinked texts crafted by undergraduate students; new coursework, workshops, and instructional videos in book history, book arts, performance, and cultural issues; deep dives into Shakespeare and local demographic representations; and white papers counseling on workshop and conference development. A sampling of the fruits from some of these programs is available at the bottom of this page.

Pedagogical Workshop at the Folger

Representatives from each micro-grant team gathered at the Folger on June 13 and 14, 2016, to attend workshops and roundtables that aided in identifying resources for student work and strategizing over their use. In the opening roundtable, "Thinking Pedagogically," Dr. Stephen Buhler performed a selection of the Bard’s sonnets set to popular rock ballads on his mandolin, while he, Dr. Diana Henderson, Dr. Kim McLean-Fiander, and Dr. Scott Trudell explored how pedagogy in the digital age requires deeper evaluations of our classroom audience and new approaches to the student, not as individuals, but as hybrid media consumers. The second roundtable, "Mediated Shakespeares" co-hosted by Dr. Alan Galey, Dr. Adam Hooks, and Dr. James Marino, concerned questions of scale, deconstruction, and different media pathways for students to approach Shakespeare.

Through micro-grant applications and dialogue with workshop speakers, five themes emerged and were explored in depth during the individual sessions of the workshop.

Book and Print History in Mediation

These workshops explored how welcoming archival materials into the classroom leads students and scholars into productive conversations of intention, production, and human error. Drs. Galey and Hooks co-hosted two interactive seminars that used various editions of Hamlet to demonstrate how students can make discoveries by examining the material text. They shared lesson plans that help student edit original printings for punctuation, diagram the printing history of a text, and more.

Digital Projects

Digital projects like the Map of Early Modern London, introduced by Dr. McLean-Fiander, demonstrated how bringing Shakespeare's world into present-day mediums and histories provides students with a nuanced understanding of his cultural impact. Drs. Owen Williams and Kyle Vitale shared some of the Folger’s evergreen and emerging digital resources, including Shakespeare Documented, Hamnet, the Digital image collection and J-STOR’s "Understanding Shakespeare," leading a conversation about the use and improvement of these tools for the undergraduate classroom.

Performance and Interactive Digital Media

Several workshops explored developments in more traditional teaching approaches. Drs. Paul Menzer, Doreen Bechtol, Buhler and Marino examined how embodied performance through music, reading aloud, and physical engagement with texts can help students understand cues and emotional construction in the text. Exploring performance pedagogy and digital media, Dr. Henderson explored classroom approaches that balance mass media and online modules with “on your feet” lesson plans, while Dr. Trudell showed how media projects like his own "Sounds of Pageantry," along with blogging platforms in the classroom, help students envision the sensory realities of performance.

Translating Shakespeare

 Dr. Alexa Huang explored the crowd sourcing power of translating Shakespeare across languages and cultures, with particular attention to editing practices as a form of cultural censorship. Dr. Huang also showed how translating Shakespeare’s complete works serves as a political ambassador for transcontinental collaboration. A session led by Dr. Georgianna Ziegler explored, through the America's Shakespeare exhibition and related content, how Shakespeare was translated, adapted and adopted by newcomers in America from advertisements to early 19th century immigrant theater productions.

Using the Digital Archive

Dr. Laura Estill, borrowing from her own World Shakespeare Bibliography, explored utilization of online archives and crowd-sourcing for creating student bibliographies and helping students learn to analyze and organize metadata. In a second "Folger Resources" talk, Dr. Williams, Dr. Vitale and the Folger’s Data Architect Michael Poston demonstrated various uses for the Folger Digital Texts API in the classroom.

Teaching Resources

Guiding Questions

Drawing from the summer workshop and micro-grant programs, the Folger Institute developed a set of questions that it believes define the present and future of Shakespeare education in US colleges and universities:

  • How do faculty introduce students to early modern material culture in ways that open channels for considering today's proliferating digital media scenes?
  • On a related note, how do faculty create classroom assignments that reach out to online resources for students with varying digital literacy and dependencies?
  • How will faculty bring a better understanding of editorial theory and practice into the classroom? (And why would they?) What are the hands-on opportunities for undergrads to approach texts as editors do, whether working with a modern print edition, a facsimile, or a digital edition?
  • How do faculty discuss the relations of text and performance, adaptation, translation, and so on?
  • How do faculty bring theater history into the discussion, from performance stills, to sound clips, to annotated prompt books?


New Micro-grant Resources

Micro-grant programs explored these questions in a variety of ways:

Dividing the Kingdom (Wayne State University): website featuring a range of interdisciplinary college teaching modules for King Lear, including syllabuses, activities, assignments, and resources that explore adaptation, cultural studies, digital humanities, digital texts, performance, philosophy, student work, and textual criticism.

Nashville Shakespeare Performance Archive (Belmont University): a modern performance archive curated by students and drawing from the Nashville Shakespeare Festival, featuring photographs, videos, and scholarship about modern directing, acting, costume design, and songwriting for Comedy of Errors and other plays.

Shakespeare at Iowa (University of Iowa): online exhibition site featuring sections on "Shakespeare in Print," "Shakespeare's Library," and "Featurettes" like "Faking Shakespeare" and "Used Books" that explore the printing, adaption, and literary context of the plays, alongside Shakespeare's educational and cultural milieu.

Will and the Word, Books in the Time of Shakespeare, and Richard III on Page and Stage (Drew University): three exhibitions digitized from the First Folio! tour that explore, respectively, the religious beliefs, powers, and books in Shakespeare's England; an overview of the early modern printing process, from papermaking to binding decoration; and representations of Richard III from theater history and print.

Time's Pencil (University of Oregon): digitized exhibition from the First Folio! tour, charting how Shakespeare was adapted, revised, and rewritten over the centuries, through images and essays exploring the Folios and sonnets, adaptations and editions through the 17th and 18th centuries, and Shakespeare in children's education.

Experiencing Shakespeare (University of Connecticut): website for "Experiencing Shakespeare" course, including videos of students editing and producing booklets of Hamlet on an antique hand press, and students viewing and then condensing King Lear into a puppet show informed by images from the Folger's Digital Image Collection.

Cleveland State Sample Syllabus (Cleveland State University): syllabus shared and developed during the "Cleveland Teaches Shakespeare" conference, featuring explorations of Hamlet through paratextual matter in Case Western Reserve Special Collections and study of the intersections between material and reception history.


New Folger Teaching Resources

Throughout the grant period, the Folger Institute also produced teaching content in response to faculty conversations and needs. What follows are some of these resources:

Image Slides: images curated from the Folger's Digital Image Collection for popular college classroom themes. Just click "Export to Powerpoint" in the top right!

Theory:

Genre:

History:


Lesson plans and assignments: adaptable .docx materials for introducing the website Shakespeare Documented into the classroom.

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