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Article Excerpt
From Digital to Dialogic Shakespeare
In the 1990s, scholarly discussion of "digital Shakespeare" revolved primarily around the electronic reproduction of print materials. One has only to think of such sites as the now-defunct "Enfolded Hamlet," MIT's Complete Works of Shakespeare, or Matty Farrow's "Moby-Shakespeare" to conclude that the Web primarily has offered virtual readers increased access to Shakespeare's texts, either as cheap, accessible web documents or as searchable databases. During the same time period, teachers and scholars demonstrated some interest in web-based or stand-alone (laserdisc, CD ROM) supplements to enrich the study of Shakespeare, whether through clips from films and performances, background materials, image banks, or professorial lectures (see Mullins for an overview). Even more ambitious attempts to create interactive spaces for experiencing Shakespeare's plays have been conducted by Peter Donaldson at MIT ("The Electronic Shakespeare Archive" (see Donaldson 1999) and Larry Friedlander at Stanford ("The Shakespeare Project" [see Friedlander 1999]).
For better or worse, Shakespeare's place in pedagogical cyberspace has been defined by the boundaries of the digital text. By contrast, in the world at large the Internet's oldest and most crucial function has been to link up readers and writers over previously insurmountable barriers of time and space. It is therefore surprising that the Internet has not been enlisted more widely to spark and maintain communication among the dispersed and growing body of Shakespeare students. Hardy Cook's well-known discussion list, SHAKSPER, aims to be inclusive, but is unusual in that regard. The discussion lists, bulletin boards, and chat rooms made available to teachers through such for-profit ventures as Blackboard and WebCT do not, generally, encourage interactions outside the boundaries of a particular class or, at best, an institution. Several of the more elaborate online classes, such as "The Electric Shakespeare" constructed by Larry Danson at Princeton and Michael Best's "Shakespeare by Individual Studies" at the University of Victoria, do envision the Web as a space where students and teachers can interact, but mostly the discussions are asynchronous and teacher-directed. (1)
This seems a pity, for as students and teachers in a post-colonial and postmodern context, we often lack knowledge of the specific educational institutions, politics, and histories that have made "Shakespeare" a protean cultural signifier. University students in Georgia, for instance, find African perspectives on Othello fascinating, but have greater difficulty understanding Martin Orkin's account of the role played by Shakespeare in the post-secondary educational system of apartheid South Africa (1998). (The same criticism might be applied to academics who find the material and ideological conditions of literary instruction across the globe of limited relevance to determining the "meaning" of "Shakespeare.") Virtual communication could go some distance toward disseminating important information about how Shakespeare is viewed, taught, and consumed, particularly in educational institutions.
On a humbler level, within smaller cultural units the motives and methods of teaching Shakespeare can also vary significantly. Another pedagogical relationship that deserves further attention is that between the teaching of Shakespeare at the secondary and university levels. As Russ McDonald puts it in a 1995 interview with U.S. secondary school teachers,
High-school teachers once attended college, and college teachers high school, but neither group seems to remember much about its experience. And times and modes of instruction have changed so much that one's own experience is probably outdated. Regrettably, little commerce occurs between the secondary school and the university, at least as far as English is concerned, and this is so because there are very few thoroughfares to promote communication. (McDonald 1995, 145)
The project discussed in this essay represents one attempt to use electronic communication, both synchronous and asynchronous, to explore the understanding of Shakespeare within a U.S. high school literature class and a university-level class in adjoining counties of Georgia. This is a tale of two cities, two classrooms, two educational institutions. Like its print predecessor by Dickens, the story of how "Shakespeare," as cultural capital, can be circulated in a virtual conversation among students at different places in the U.S. educational system has an ambivalent conclusion. The essay also reports on successive iterations of the collaboration and on adjustments made by the teachers to frame the interactions between the high school and college classes. Finally, we hope that our experiences with the Shakespeare Dialogues will suggest possibilities for further conversation, not just between teachers at the different levels, but among secondary and tertiary-level teachers and students as a community that is extended in time and space.
The Shakespeare Dialogues as Project and Process
The project described here, which is part of a GSTEP (Georgia Systemic Teacher Education Program) initiative, (2) was conducted by one university and one high school English teacher to satisfy two related purposes: first, to interest students from the university English Department in secondary school teaching by offering them structured, productive interaction with secondary-school teachers and students early in their careers; and second, to give high school students a preview of the university's ways of thinking and writing about literature. Since many of the students from this particular high school go on to the University of Georgia, the interaction seemed potentially capable of helping students make that sometimes painful transition from high school to college. Conversely, the experiment could benefit those English majors in the University course who might be interested in teaching, but did not plan to transfer directly into the English Education Program that confers State Certification for public school teaching. At least briefly, these undergraduates could assume the responsibilities of teacher and weigh their interest in the profession before investing further time and money in teacher training. Shakespeare's The Tempest was to be the common ground of our interactions. While the experiment yielded useful insights into teacher education, Shakespeare pedagogy, and local educational relations--useful enough that the two teachers were willing to repeat the experience--the ensuing conversations among students also provide a telling profile of how "school Shakespeare" is deployed in intellectual power relations. In this respect, the Shakespeare Dialogues, as local ethnography, describe an intellectual experience that exists outside or beside the larger "culture wars," in which Shakespeare is enlisted to support various radical, conservative, and progressive ideologies.
Over about a one-month period, while both classes were studying The Tempest, a small group of volunteer students from Christy Desmet's "Introduction to English Studies" class in the Department of English at the University of Georgia and the students in Roger Bailey's twelfth-grade Advanced Placement English class at Oconee County High School, Georgia met virtually to discuss the play. These conversations took place in synchronous chat rooms, at designated times, and asynchronously via a bulletin board; both technologies were provided through the university by WebCT. (3) For the experience, each class used Gerald Graff and James Phelan's Bedford Casebook of The Tempest. There was much preliminary work to do. We talked to the high school county Curriculum Director and technology czars at both locales, then sent home explanations and permission forms to both students and parents. We dealt with the filter systems in the high school computer lab (designed to eliminate pornography), with the quirks of WebCT, with confusions over passwords and logins, and with the schedules of both groups. In the course of the project, Christy made several trips to the high school campus; Roger and Christy also met periodically in coffee houses to review events and make future plans. At the end of the experiment, another member from our GSTEP committee debriefed the high school students in a taped discussion of about one-and-a-half hours. Throughout the project, we dealt, as one always does, with technological surprises and human shortcomings. (4)
The final pool of participants for the "Shakespeare Dialogues" included eight university students and thirty-two secondary school students, distributed into seven groups. Each group was assigned a topic, largely, organized around different characters or pairs of characters, although one group was assigned to explicate the wedding masque. Roger Bailey chose the topics; Christy Desmet selected the groups at random. These...
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