Inside-out way to Bard hooks kids

JONOTHAN Neelands is on a global mission to transform the teaching of Shakespeare in schools.

Jonothan Neeland

JONOTHAN Neelands is on a global mission to transform the teaching of Shakespeare in schools, rescuing it from the privileged status of "literature" for a few and bringing it back to play-acting and theatre for all.

Professor of drama at Warwick University and creative education at the Warwick Business School in England, Professor Neelands has developed with the Royal Shakespeare Company teaching materials for schools based on the dramatic techniques the RSC and its actors use when they produce the plays for the stage.

He has teachers push back the desks and students speaking Shakespeare's words aloud, exploring different ways of delivering the lines, drawing on students' own experiences and emotions to consider the motivation of the characters, as actors do.

"When (literary critic) Harold Bloom talks about Shakespeare, he talks about reading it but Shakespeare was a playwright, not a readwright," Professor Neelands said.

"If you look at it on the page, it makes no sense to you at all. But 87 per cent of his audience were illiterate, and a lot of the words he was using he was inventing, so they went off the sound.

"This guy was an absolute master of sound, so when kids speak it, they start to get it, just from the sound of it. The understanding of Shakespeare's language comes when you speak it."

Professor Neelands is in Australia to deliver a lecture tonight at Sydney University and master classes for teachers on theatre-based teaching methods.

Rather than telling students what the plays mean, or insisting students make feminist, Marxist of post-colonial interpretations, Professor Neelands said the Teaching Shakespeare method takes an "inside-out approach".

"We ask young people to bring what they know about the world, human behaviour and love, loss and separation, bring that to the play and make sense of the play through their own experience," he said. "Shakespeare doesn't tell you what to do with his words, so we give young people choices.

"Is this something shouted or said quietly, said next to somebody or would you stand apart? That's when they start thinking how they would act in that situation.

"We want to encourage ways of teaching that are more likely to help young people make a connection than feel put off by Shakespeare, which many do because of the way it's taught."

To that end, Professor Neelands and the RSC push for Shakespeare to be introduced to students in primary schools, not left to the middle years of high schools when adolescents are more self-conscious and reluctant to get up and act for the first time.

The program, running for five or six years in England and taken around the world, has been shown to not only significantly improve students' interest in Shakespeare, but also their attitude to school in general.