Below is a proposal that I submitted for the EGSA (English Grad Student Association). If this proposal flies, I will be giving a talk on Friday, Feb. 17th at the Write to Learn Conference and then again on Saturday, Feb. 18th at the EGSA Conference! Thankfully, I’m not presenting at 4Cs this year so I won’t have to worry about adding another paper/preso to the mix. However, the paper for this proposal is mostly done so that also helps matters.

Demystifying Shakespeare: Multi-Modal Curricular Reform

This presentation will examine the gains to be made by implementing a multi-modal approach to teaching Shakespeare by including theatre, film, audio, and electronic resources. Although instructors have good reasons for structuring classes as we do, I will argue that many instructors need to implement multi-modal pedagogical changes in order to reach different types of student-learners.

In his text, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, Gerald Graff argues that college faculty need to demystify intellectual-academic speak in order to introduce students to the rich world of ideas and argumentation. More specifically, Graff contends that “academia reinforces cluelessness by making its ideas, problems, and ways of thinking look more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than they need to be” (1). While Shakespeare’s language can be considered intellectual, it can also be considered opaque and more mystifying that it needs to be. Students need help to appreciate its vibrancy. However, just asking students to read the text will not go far enough in addressing their mystification. Instructors can improve their pedagogy and help students’ learning process by implementing pedagogical changes for visual, kinesthetic, and aural learners. Further, I will also pick up Graff’s argument and urge instructors to collaborate with colleagues, introduce criticism, and pare syllabi so we can avoid other miss-cues and help students get a clue, or in other words, help students enter the intellectual-academic conversation without making it seem that doing so is beyond students’ learning abilities.