TEACHING SHAKESPEARE

A classroom researcher spent a year studying the instruction of a teacher who pairs multimodal texts with Shakespeare to disrupt the canon. The first goal balanced the demands of an advanced English curriculum and Common Core State Standards by focusing on dynamic and static characters and the use of textual evidence to develop claims throughout a piece of writing. The second goal also leveraged an important English literacy: recognizing figurative language as an author's rhetorical device. Ms. Selena Hughes designed her instruction to focus on one pattern in Shakespeare's figurative language: how the animal imagery employed throughout Othello removes characters' humanity, becomes a codified way to talk about race, and positions Othello as an "other." In addition, Ms. Hughes extended this pattern to demonstrate how repetitive othering language resulted in Othello's internalization of the racialized othering.