Reports on recent College activities and a selection of announcements, events and initiatives in the wider education community.
Virtual Shakespeare lab
Mewling, onion-eyed miscreant!
After two decades of turning kids on to Shakespeare, Toronto-based actor and director Michael Kelly wants to help teachers make the Bard more accessible. Kelly has launched a learning lab that features lesson plans and teaching aids ranging from how to conduct a sword fight to how to deliver insults in Elizabethan English. "The problem with teaching Shakespeare," Kelly says, "is that most teachers treat his plays solely as literature. They read the plays instead of performing them out loud. Shakespeare needs to be spoken. I want to help teachers take Shakespeare from the page to the stage."
Kelly, the founder and artistic director of Shakespeare in Action, worked on the virtual teaching lab component of his web site for about a decade before it went live in February. It is divided into a teachers' and a students' section and features some 50 videos. "The key is cracking the language barrier," says Kelly. "The idea is to get the students to engage, embrace the language and have some fun with it." Hence the insults lessons that include an exercise where students pick from two dozen words in three columns to come up with three-word epithets such as, "Thou mewling, onion-eyed miscreant!" The exercises are accompanied by lesson plans.
Another video allows students to play along karaoke-style in scenes from Hamlet, Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet. Established in 1988, Shakespeare in Action is a theatre company dedicated to “fostering literacy, enhancing creativity and promoting speech arts by making the language and stories of Shakespeare accessible and relevant to young audiences." The company puts on student performances and runs workshops and summer camps. Since 2009 it has been the theatre-in-residence company at Central Commerce Collegiate Institute in the Toronto DSB. Kelly hopes to expand the web site soon to include a chat room for teachers.
For more information and to access the learning lab, visit shakespeareinaction.org - SIA Virtual Lab.
