Shakespeare and Classic Works in the Classroom

Teaching Pre-20th Century Literature at KS2 and KS3

Dennis Carter

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134138692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

With supportive guidelines for Key Stages 2 and 3 this book offers active approaches for teaching pre-twentieth century literature with confidence. Key texts including The Odyssey, Hamlet and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are explained in a very practical and accessible way. This text allows for creativity amongst pupils at the same time as improving their reading and writing abilities within the literacy strategy objectives and KS3 English framework guidelines.

The author looks to develop an active pedagogy that encompasses the literacy strategy, the KS3 English framework and the creative arts. Using case studies from primary and secondary school projects a series of lessons are proposed for each year group from Year 4 though to Year 8. The lessons cover poetry, drama, story and the novel.

Chapter 1
Bringing Shakespeare and classic works to children

Introduction

Apart from occasional encounters I came to great literature late in my own education. There was grandfathers memorisation of Grays ‘Elegy written in a country churchyard’ and ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’. Sometimes, if we were lucky, he would speak a few verses out loud just to prove he knew them off by heart’ and we would listen attentively to this boiler-maker’s relish for poetry. But these were private pursuits for him. His well-worn Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Verse was kept on his bedside table. His daughter, my mother, also liked to recall being Rosalind in a school production of As You Like It, even naming my sister after that character. Or she would provide brief snippets of the plots of The Merchant of Venice with ‘that villain Shylock’ or of Twelfth Nightwith ‘that drunken rascal Sir Toby’.

As with many people it was a single teacher who enabled me really to be touched by great literature, a man in his twenties called Wilf Kimber, at Prenton Secondary Modern School, Birkenhead. I was in the GCE stream and Mr Kimber fired me up about Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Dickens’s Great Expectations and poems by Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning. I can particularly remember the lines ‘dry clashed his harness in the icy caves and all to left and right the bare, black cliffs clang’d round him as he based his feet on juts of slippery crag that rang sharp smitten with the dint of armed heels’, from Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’. Those lines jump straight out of my head almost without my thinking. It was one of the quotes we learnt to impress the examiners with our knowledge of assonance, alliteration and onomatopoeia. More importantly, its sound moves me powerfully even now.

Although I passed the exam, like many of my contemporaries from the working classes of Merseyside, I had to find employment at the age of sixteen. Then the practicalities of earning a living pushed King Arthur, the noble Brutus, the cunning Cassius, Pip, Miss Havisham and Estelle into the background. Yet the richness of these stories, the intimacy I had developed with the characters and the resonance of the language that carried them bubbled on underneath the surface. Consequently, I felt I was lucky when I heard many of my contemporaries saying that they hated Shakespeare or that Charles Dickens was boring. I had been taught by someone special.

Wilf Kimber manifested a love for the novels, the plays and the poems he taught. When reading passages to us you could tell he did. He was no Lawrence Olivier, but you knew he was putting his best into it. He relished speaking Cassius lines with a mean voice or Pumblechook’s with a pompous one. Through him I had been touched by the greatness of literature. In the words of the Italian critic Italo Calvino in Why Read the Classics?,1 my youth had endowed those readings with a unique flavour and significance’. Perhaps the experiences with Wilf Kimber in the first floor of an old, downtown school had ‘given a form or shape to [my] future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorising them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty’ (Calvino 1999: 4).

Long after favourite films and television programmes had faded from my memory I could recollect the thrilling speech by Mark Anthony at the funeral of Caesar or identify with Pip’s falling expectations when Magwich appears at his home one night to identify himself as Pip’s true benefactor. Although these classics had been read, in Calvino’s words, out of a sense of duty or respect’, because of the GCE paper, I had really been reading them Tor love’ (ibid: 6). But wasn’t this a fortunate accident? What if I had gone to a different school and my experience had been of a droning bore or a rigid taskmaster only interested in getting more A-grade passes than anyone else? Might I have hated Shakespeare, too? Might I also have found Dickens boring?

When training to be a primary teacher I discovered a pleasure equal to that of sitting in Wilf Kimber’s classes. I found that the sharing of enthusiasms with children is as great as pursuing those enthusiasms for oneself. Asked to prepare lessons on Tudors in history for teaching practice with a Year 4 class I was soon teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream and directing a production of the rude mechanicals’ scenes and the children adored it! So did the class teacher and my supervisor. But wasn’t I working on a mere hunch? What was the relevance of this? What were the aims and objectives? How did I know I was doing the right thing?

Luckily for me such questions were not asked with the same sort of intent in the 1960s and I was able to follow my literary enthusiasms with children for many years to come. I grew ambitious. It seemed that so much great literature was suitable for children alongside the children’s literature they were reading themselves or sharing as a class. My canon expanded to include Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens, Milton, Swift and a range of poems from most periods of English poetry and much in translation.

I was attempting to generate that feeling of love of great literature and help the children endow their reading of such works with a unique flavour and significance’. I realised that secondary school might be too late for many children to have significant experiences of great literature and that the context of examinations was more likely to put them off than turn them on. There are not many Wilf Kimbers around.

However, the climate in schools has changed radically since I was experimenting in primary and middle schools in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The Educational Reform Act of 1988 and subsequent initiatives have tended to stop hunches, experimentation, and the pursuit of the ideas argued by Italo Calvino. ‘Entitlement’ was the buzzword in the late eighties and nineties as if a national curriculum, testing and inspection could guarantee good provision throughout the land. This process has been taken much further with the ‘nuts and bolts’ of literacy laid out in detail in the National Literacy Strategy and in the Key Stage 3 Framework for Teaching English. But such programmes cannot guarantee that children will endow their reading ‘with a unique flavour and significance’. Indeed, the danger is that they may have the opposite effect. Children are more likely to read great literature, if they read it at all in their schools, ‘out of a sense of duty or respect’ rather than reading it ‘for love’. There is even the danger that they might learn to hate the works or find them one more boring set of steps through school.

In this book I offer my own enthusiasm for great or classic works of literature to students and teachers and my enthusiasm for sharing it with children in the middle years of schooling. I realise, however, that this is not enough. I therefore share more than thirty years of experience of teaching classic works to children in Key Stages 2 and 3, many years of organising large-scale projects in primary and secondary schools and my researches into the field. This chapter and Chapter 2 develop reasons for doing this kind of work and ways of doing it using the creative arts. The other five chapters provide case studies and projects for teachers to try. At the end of the book there are ten tables, which show the objectives covered in the National Curriculum for both Key Stages 22 and 3,3 the National Literacy Strategy Framework for teachers4 and the Key Stage 3 National Strategy Framework for teaching English.5

Great literature and creativity

Much of the thinking which led to the 1988 Act and subsequent developments was notable for a deep scepticism towards child-centred education and creativity. There was and still is a belief that knowledge, skills and abilities were neglected in pursuit of individual self-expression. Everybody in education is aware of this argument, notably through the many controversial pronouncements made by the previous Chief Inspector of Schools throughout the 1990s.

Yet this negative attitude towards the ideology which dominated educational thought for more than 30 years had been growing for much longer. It surfaced in the mid-1970s in the Black Papers, and many prominent thinkers articulated versions of it. For instance, in an interview with the Director of the Shakespeare and Schools Project, Dr Rex Gibson, Dr Jonathan Miller expressed great concern at what he perceived to be a general movement against literacy in our schools:

Speaking verse, knowing poetry, learning verses of the Bible off by heart and being acquainted with the literature of the past is something which has given way to what I believe to be a slightly suspect subject: creativity. The emphasis is put upon the child’s creativity rather than the achieved creativity of the great reputations of the past.6

The feeling that children were having little or no experience of great art works and classical texts was widespread. It led to the establishment of the Shakespeare and Schools Project in the mid-eighties and to arts projects funded by such bodies as the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust. An article in the TES in 1990, by Adrian Greeves of Westminster College, Oxford, was fairly typical of this attitude. Greeves specifically identified child-centred education as the cause of the loss of great works in the primary school:

It is a long time since I heard in a primary classroom the larger sounds of poetry or prose not written expressly for children: child-centred learning has won the day so triumphantly that we are in danger of producing child-restricted learning.7

But wasn’t Greeves, like Miller, aiming his criticisms at the wrong target? Surely, it was not the child-centredness of the pedagogy which was to blame so much as the limited vision of what children are capable of understanding and handling. He continued, ‘in addition to the revolution in children’s literature we need to have a revolution in literature for children’. Greeves was right in this. A powerful and rich resource for the development of children’s understanding of the world was and still is being neglected. Greeves saw this as a form of impoverishment of children’s imaginations and saw more exciting possibilities: A child’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s an education for? It’s good to be allowed to play with pussy-cats; but it is enlarging as well as challenging to confront the dazzle of the “Tyger”’ (Greeves 1990). Such concerns are just as pressing in 2002 as they were in 1990 and I address them positively and practically in this book.

Culture and the individual

There would be, however, grave dangers in a move away from self-expression, creativity and child-centredness towards engagement solely with great literature of the past. It would be folly to advance the cause of the classics so far that the individual needs of children were moved to the margins of education. But it seems that, according to Miller and Greeves, so long as we get children hearing and speaking ‘Tyger, Shakespeare, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the King James Bible, culture’ will stick to them willy-nilly.

There has to be a balance. An exclusive focus on great literature would be inadequate. There is also a need to focus on the individual, on creativity and expressiveness and those things Miller and Greeves were so suspicious about. The most productive way forward, I believe, is for teachers to concentrate on the individual frequently operating his creativity within great works. Such an enterprise involves a great deal more than making the larger sounds of poetry or prose’ resound in the classroom or ‘learning verses of the Bible off by heart and being acquainted with the literature of the past’. It requires the movement of feeling and involves teachers in a more subtle, demanding and responsible vocation than getting children to perform other people’s plays, to do recitations for concerts, Eisteddfodau or school assemblies. Such practices, which are important parts of the cultural lives of children in schools, are simply not enough.

A fuller literary and cultural experience consists of personal and shared encounters in the outside world which, in childhood, are manifested in various forms of play. However, an individual’s relationship with the culture begins with the inner world of the individual and not with the culture itself. Without using their inner worlds children would be virtually unable to act at all within the culture, let alone respond to its great works. Children’s cultural activity, therefore, depends upon an actively developing inner world, and the agent of such activity is sensibility. Without the engagement of sensibility within the culture an individual’s experience of cultural forms will be more to do with consumption than personal enrichment.

Creative literacy

There need be no actual conflict between Dr Miller’s wish to engage children with the great works of art of the past and a wish for them to exercise creativity. Indeed, it is quite clear that the proper engagement of children with the works of great artists such as Shakespeare depends upon the exercise of individual creativity. In this way the child-centred approach to education is seen to have a new importance.

Ironically, at the same time as the child-centred approach was being so contemptuously debunked by politicians and schools inspectors, educational theorists were advocating reader-response theory. This, crudely, claims that the reader is at least the equal of the writer in relation to any text. Richard Andrews, for instance,8 makes the analogy with music and theatre, that ‘the score or script [text] is but a mere template for the performance’ of the reader reading it (Andrews 2001: 71). Citing the work of Wolfgang Iser, Andrews writes that the act of reading is as creative as the act of composition’, and continues:

For the reader, the act of reading is a constructive, compositional one in which he or she brings not only his/her experience of the world, but also experience of reading other texts. For the text, the embedded affective possibilities are not released until the reader releases them – and then they may not be the same concoction as was released before … It is the interaction between reader and text that is the key to the interpretative act. (ibid.: 72)

Obviously, taken to the extreme, this theory relegates the importance of the literature itself and might encourage the unrestricted subjectivism of an anything goes’ attitude. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Bringing Shakespeare and classic works to children
• Chapter 2 Teaching and learning processes
• Chapter 3 Epics and myths
• Chapter 4 Narrative poetry
• Chapter 5 Shakespeare
• Chapter 6 Prose fiction
• Chapter 7 Lyric poetry
• Appendix: Project tables
• Select bibliography
• Index