The prompt for this blog entry was to dive into the back of my mind somewhere and remember and effective/ineffective context or strategy used in an English Language Arts class. My first problem was remembering any experiences at all - never mind whether they were effective or ineffective! I had to reflect as to why it was so difficult for me to recall something that had only happened six years ago. Don't get me wrong, I retained A LOT of information and was very interested in English, hence the degree in English literature I have hanging on my wall beside me as I write this. I dug and dug into the depths of my brain for a memory of a lesson - any lesson - and I found this.
Grade 12: the mandatory learning-about-Shakespeare's Hamlet-because-it-is-on-the-provincial-exam unit. I think high school was the reason I hated Shakespeare until I got to university where my Shakespeare professor compared Titus Andronicus to Batman: The Dark Knight. Regardless, my grade 12 teacher photocopied the play for us so we could actually keep the play and write notes in the margins and highlight important parts and doodle on it when the class was less exciting. I'm sure we had guided discussions about the "To Be or Not To Be" speech and a friend of mine says that we even compared Hamlet to the Lion King as an example of how the play has influenced stories in popular culture (I don't remember this AT ALL). From what I can recall, my instructor taught mainly from an inquiry-based approach, where we would have class discussions prompted by questions she would ask us.
What I remember most from that unit though, was our lesson about character development and perspectives in the play; specifically, what the play would look like from a different character's perspective. For the readers who may be unaware of the context of the play there are two characters, Rosencrantz and Gildestern, who are always in the background of the play's plot running around like tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum but always happen to be there for the important parts. After having been exposed to a predominantly inquiry-based approach to discovering the intricacies of the play I was relieved to hear that my instructor was going to show us a film! Finally, an outside resource and a break from frantically writing in the margins. The movie was called "Rosencrantz and Gildestern" and was the full story of Hamlet from the perspective of those two characters. We saw what the plot would have looked like from another character's perspective and not only that but the movie was comical! After the movie the class was followed by group discussions comparing the two perspectives and we wrote a short response to the movie.
Looking back, the approach my teacher took to building on our knowledge about the play was essential for our understanding of the movie. She did not go through the play linearly from act to act, but instead picked themes and encouraged us to think of the play as a whole, as well as sectionally. According to my English language arts textbook, constructivist and sociolinguistic learning theories state that "readers create meaning through negotiation with the texts they are reading, and, similarly, writers create meaning through negotiation with the texts they are writing." Not only were we negotiating different perspectives to the play, but we were writing about different ways the play could be interpreted and written according to our negotiation. We were engaging with the text and negotiating different angles and choosing which one felt best.
Maybe we did this I don't know, but a fun follow-up activity would have been to choose a different character from the play and wrote a potential scene from the play in their perspective.
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