UC Davis

Shakespeare Fixes: Equitable Approaches to Shakespeare Pedagogy in U.S. High Schools examines the world of Shakespeare professional development and pedagogy for high school teachers. Shakespeare’s works occupy a unique place in U.S. schooling, where, due to both the entrenched status of his works in U.S. curricula and the challenging nature of his language, a near inexhaustible amount of materials exists to aid teachers who assign his texts. These resources come from a variety of sources, including educators, Shakespeare scholars, theater professionals, and policy makers, and the values that these creators impart onto the resources they produce are just as varied. Shakespeare is often approached in education as a tool to solve a specific problem with schooling, and Shakespeare Fixes explores the various “fixes” Shakespeare has been applied to in schooling, but also the problems that such “fixes” have resulted in. Just as often Shakespeare is the thing that needs fixing, and Shakespeare Fixes explores both ends of that spectrum. In the introduction, I explore Shakespeare’s rise to prominence in the U.S. school system and discuss debates over the place of Shakespeare’s works in classrooms in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In chapter 1, I examine the trend in the 1980s and 1990s of Shakespeare scholars turning their research towards pedagogical approaches, and argue that Shakespeare pedagogy became a haven for scholars wishing to escape the politics of the academy, who positioned Shakespeare as a politically neutral site and designed pedagogical resources that ignored or hid the problematic racial, gendered, or classist constructions of his works. In chapter 2, I examine the expansion of the College Board’s Advanced Placement Program in the early 2000s, which was seen as a fix to equity issues in schools that were failing lower-income and minority students. I examine in particular the AP English Literature and Composition course and exam, as well as College Board resources for teachers and private test preparation materials for students, all of which place a surprising value on studying Shakespeare’s works. I argue that Shakespeare is presented as a solution to studying for this exam in ways that undermine efforts to diversify AP reading material. Further, the test-prep industry presents Shakespeare as a tool for success while also promoting his works as the epitome of Western literature, reinforcing problematic notions of Shakespeare’s universality. Chapter 3 examines the case of Folger Education, who provide a vast wealth of materials to their teacher-subscribers. But the lack of theoretical grounding of their Folger Method, I argue, coupled with an at times uncritical promotion of Shakespeare’s universal goodness, undermines the Folger’s justice-oriented goals. The chapter closes by comparing Folger Education to two academia-based Shakespeare professional-development projects that arguably deliver more effective Shakespeare PD. Together, these chapters show that one reason Shakespeare pedagogy fails to fix inequalities in education is that developers of Shakespeare pedagogy and PD have often been more concerned with defending Shakespeare’s centrality in the curriculum, obfuscating the identity differences that are at the root of so much inequality in schools. I conclude by arguing that a “Shakespeare network” exists in the U.S., connecting schools, colleges, theaters, and researchers across disciplines. This network presents an opportunity for collaboration between these different groups to leverage Shakespeare’s entrenched status for social justice.