Applying Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences to Shakespeare

This article will focus on applying Gardner’s theory of
multiple intelligences to the teaching of Shakespeare in a homeschool
environment.

Those responsible for the teaching of Shakespeare often tremble with fear when deciding exactly how to teach his work to young students. Homeschool parents are usually a creative bunch, focusing on their children’s individual learning styles instead of a standardized format. The teaching of Shakespeare resists standardization. This freedom in teaching Shakespeare is both exciting and terrifying. The varied possibilities of teaching the Bard’s work can leave one with scrambled brains, yet we know the possibilities are endless.

As we do for most subjects we must teach, we look to our children’s learning styles to dictate the teaching methods. As homeschooling parents, this is the optimal approach that public school teachers cannot often afford with limited time and space. If you do not know your child’s/children’s learning style, you can visit http://www.mypersonality.info/multiple-intelligences/ for a painless assessment. Understanding their individual learning style can lead you to creating a personalized approach to teaching Shakespeare!

In her article, “Is Style Everything? Teaching That Achieves Its Objectives,” Diane Carson, professor emeritus at St. Louis Community College and avid proponent of Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, says that we, as teachers, understandably focus so much on the content of our curricula that how we teach becomes a secondary concern. Gardner outlined at least seven types of intelligences including:

1)linguistic
2)logical-mathematical
3)visual-spatial
4)bodily-kinesthetic
5)musical
6)interpersonal
7)intrapersonal

And possibly…
8)naturalist

For more detailed information on these different types of intelligences, refer to above website link, which is full of descriptions and examples for each learning style. Understanding these learning styles, says Carson, “leads to the awareness that preferred learning styles directly and
dramatically impact all our educational choices.” Specifically, learning your children’s learning styles can provide the direction for the type of instruction you use to teach Shakespeare. The upside is that you have the time and space to experiment and figure out what works best. Below you will find specific ideas for applying Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences to the
teaching of Shakespeare.

Gota a linguistic learner who loves words, language, and writing?
-Have your child transform a scene in a play into a short story in which they can use any setting.
-Ask you child to journal their thoughts about the readings.
-Do some written brainstorms as you read.
-Make a Shakespeare crossword puzzle with written clues like “This character is in love with Cleopatra,” for example.

Got a logical-mathematical learner who loves patterns, catergories, and numbers?
-Have your child categorize different characters in the play. Who are the “good guys,” the “bad guys,” the “strong” or “weak” characters?
-Have your child compare certain characters to real-life people, family members, celebrities, public people, etc. Who does Hamlet remind you of? Do you know any Ophelias?
-Allow these learners to create a computer program based on their Shakespeare studies. Maybe a jeopardy game on jeopardylab.com!

Got a visual-spatial learner who loves visualzing, day-dreaming, and working with colors and pictures?
-Have your learner draw a scene from their mind’s eye.
- Have your child create a story map of a play or brainstorm
ideas about the play.
-Allow your learner to create art projects based on the plays while allowing them the freedom to interpret and create whatever they like. (Make fairy costumes for Midsummer,
make finger puppets, make a clay model of the Globe Theatre, etc.)

Got a bodily-kinesthetic learner who loves using their whole body or parts of the body to solve problems?
-Act out scenes as you read them
-Plan out a performance to record
-Incorporate and encourage rhythmic movements to your readings
-Read in suitable environment. (Midsummer on a forest trail or in a state park, Hamlet in a castle constructed by your visual-spatial learner, etc.)

Got a musical learner who, obviously, loves music, beats, and rhythms?
-Watch musical adaptations of the plays (they exist!)
-Create your own musicals based on the plays
-Read while listening to themed music
-Ask your learner to create soundtracks for the plays

Got an interpersonal learner who understands others' emotions and feelings?
-Read plays with peer groups. Invite their friends over for a co-op Shakespeare reading.
-Have this learner lead the group discussions
-Ask your child to identify the characters’ feelings and motivations based on their lines

Got an intrapersonal learner who understands their own feelings and attitudes?
-Start an interactive journal about the plays with your child, otherwise called a dialogue journal, in which your child can express their feelings/questions regarding the play
-Guide your learner in writing goals for learning the plays and help child meet those goals.

Got a naturalist learner who loves being in the environment and working outside?
-Read plays outside
-Take your learner to a Shakespeare Garden to see, touch, and smell all the “Shakespearean” flowers.

Most people have strengths in multiple intelligences, so the combination of activities and tasks can vary, especially if you have more than one learner. In such cases, you can guide your children to work together on a project, for instance:

Making Costumes for Midsummer
Night’s Dream

-Your logical learner can research the time period of the first play and restrict the others to certain fabrics and colors that were used during that time period.
-Your visual-spatial learners can pick out fabrics and assemble them
-Your naturalist learner can collect props from the environment (twigs, pine cones, leaves, flowers for headbands, etc.)
-Your linguistic and interpersonal learners can write about
the family’s experience in a journal and/or create a scrapbook.

These are only some activities you can do with your children to enhance their individual
understanding of Shakespeare. Relying on these learning styles, curricula seems to sprout from your children’s needs rather than attempting to fit a standardized reading of Shakespeare to all students and potentially losing some, boring others, and engaging a few. As with most subjects, it is valuable to identify and gear lessons to different learning styles to keep the learning
environment fresh, engaging, and stimulating.

Diane Carson. "Is Style Everything?: Teaching That Achieves Its Objectives." Cinema Journal 48.3 (2009): 95-101. Project MUSE. Web. 22 Jan. 2011.

Picture from http://web.mac.com/rchromey/Creative_Bible_Teaching/CBT.Session_Five.Learning_Styles.html

Musical Shakespeare

For your musically-talented learners, Rufus Wainwright's beautifully sung sonnets are a rare treat. Even as an added touch to your study of the sonnets, Wainwright's "sonnet songs" bring the poetry to life. Listening to these sonnet songs can prompt discussions about rhythym, music, rhymes, and beat.

Younger children can easily be exposed to these ballads, singing out Shakespearean phrases well before they can carry their Complete Works of Shakespeare text. You can also purchase the CD When Loves Speaks, which includes readings by such actors as Alan Rickman, John Hurt, Kenneth Branagh, and more, as well as musical interpretations by Rufus Wainwright, Annie Lennox, and more. It's easy to pop this CD in the car and listen while running errands, or listen at home during chores or dinnertime. Weaving Shakespearean readings and songs into our lives is a gentle way of exposing our children to Shakespeare.

Sonnet Comparisons

Not only can deciphering Shakespeare's sonnets be difficult, but the individual readings can also morph the reading. As you study the sonnets, ask different family members to read the sonnets aloud and compare the distinctions.


What words do we enunciate? Do we cringe when we read "reeks," in Sonnet 130, with our modern minds?


Snagging ourselves on some words that seem ill-fitting is natural, but remember Shakespeare's careful choice of words instead of flying through them. Look up tricky words in the online etymology dictionary (http://etymonline.com/).

As a fun treat, listen to this video together. It is a dual reading of Sonnet 130 by Daniel Radcliffe, young star of Harry Potter, and Alan Rickman, accomplished actor. Despite it being the same words spoken, both Radcliffe and Rickman enunciate certain words. Compare and contrast these readings to each other and with your own!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s2PnG1W1gM

Shakespeare Animated Tales- Hamlet

Watching Shakespeare Animated Tales is a gentle way of introducing Shakespeare to younger students. Even older students who are having trouble visualizing the scenes may watch in order to understand the gist of the play. The video above of Shakespeare's Hamlet is an great example of these programs. The animation is serious enough to remain loyal to the play and is fluid enough to be a refreshing and engaging version.

Comprehensive Hamlet Unit Study

Hamlet is a dark and ghostly play that is meant for older readers but can be used as a unit
theme for multi-aged students. Hamlet, like many of Shakespeare’s plays, can be
a shared family experience that reaches beyond literature to encompasse many
subjects across the board. Below are some ideas for turning Hamlet into a unit study for all family members.

Geography-
Hamlet takes place in Denmark. If your family uses a hanging world map, you can
have your children plot a marker on the country of Denmark. For geography studies,
you can learn about the country of Denmark.

• Explore http://www.denmarkfacts.com/
  to learn about the country.

• Read fairy tales, like “The Little Mermaid,”
  written by Hans Christian Anderson, a Denmark author, to younger children

• Have younger ones play with Legos, building
  blocks which were invented in Denmark

• Learn a few Danish words

• Create Danish meals to share as a family
  
  For older children
• Have children locate the coordinates of Denmark

• Have children create weather reports for Denmark

History/Cultural Studies

• Explore http://www.kidskonnect.com/subject-index/26-countriesplaces/309-denmark.html to learn more about Danish history and culture. Many students, for example,
  wonder why Claudius became king instead of Hamlet. Learning about the history
  of Denmark’s monarchy will yield that answer!

• Have younger ones create a flag of Denmark or color pictures of native birds like the Atlantic Puffin.

Character Studies

Shakespeare’s plays offer a wealth of character studies both positive and negative. Hamlet, as well, is chock full of character traits to examine as a family.

Hesitation

The central question in the play is: What will Hamlet do? The short answer is: he will hesitate.
“Hesitation” is a quality you can explore as a family. When is it okay to hesitate? When is it dangerous to hesitate? Create a family brainstorm session comparing positive and negative forms of hesitation.

Madness
In Hamlet, we are witness to many forms of madness. Older students can closely examine the psychological “madness” of Ophelia. Hamlet’s “madness” at contemplating suicide ( or did he?)

Psychology

Literature is brimming with characters exemplifying psychological concepts. Understanding these ideas through cold psychology textbooks alone is difficult, but literature provides excellent patients for study, and Hamlet is no exception.

- Older students can explore the Oedipus complex as they read Hamlet. Could Hamlet’s hesitation be linked to the Oedipus complex?

- Read through Ernest Jones’s look at the Oedipus complex in Hamlet: http://www.shakespeare-navigators.com/jones/

- Examine Hamlet’s depression. What kinds of treatment methods does Claudius
suggest? For budding medical students, this could turn into an extensive study!

- Apply Jungian psychology to characters in the play

Weaving psychology into literature can be intense. For younger children, these concepts can be simplified and made into practical discussions.

When working with a piece of literature, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the ideas and possibilities are endless! Often, subjects need not be divided as many of these activities
are multi-subject. Below are even more multi-model, multi-age, and multi-subject activities your family can do while reading Hamlet.

More Hamlet activities:

· Construct a mini-castle to scale. Try to be true to the period by researching castles during the 1500s. Learn new “castle vocabulary” such as turrets, moat, parapet, etc.

· Create actor puppets and use them to display
scenes

· Perform a readers’ theatre. Assign roles to different family members and stage a scene. Discuss how to set up the scene, or use http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/stage/a%20scene/scene2.html for more ideas.

· Watch different film versions of Hamlet to compare/contrast

· Film your own staging of a scene and compare/contrast it to professional versions

· “Pick” out the names of flowers and herbs in this play and do a mini-botanical-study on each. Discuss the role of flowers in this play. **Check your local area for a “Shakespeare Garden,” which contains only plants, flowers, herbs, and trees mentioned in his work.

· Watch Disney’s The Lion King and compare/contrast it to the play.

Teaching Shakespeare: A Classroom Perspective, a Homeschool Solution

Most of us have high school memories of reading Shakespeare, whether they be engaging trysts with a reading of Romeo and Juliet or a forced digestion of Julius Caesar. We may have hated or loved the way our teachers taught Shakespeare, leaving a stain or a warm-hearted feeling for the works of the great bard. But, now that we have readied ourselves to teaching Shakespeare in a homeschool environment, we look back at our experiences being learners of Shakespeare. There is an undeniable pressure to becoming the "teacher" of Shakespeare's works, but, I wonder, is one ever only a "teacher" and nevermore the "student" of Shakespeare?

In his article, "Shakespeare Goes to High School: Some Current Practices in the American Classroom," Russ McDonald explores the experience of teaching Shakespeare in the classroom and had interviewed four remarkable teachers.

It should be mentioned that he didn't just pull these teachers out of a hat; these four teachers have practiced at the Teaching Shakespeare Institute which was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

For the homeschool teacher cracking open a Shakespeare play, peeking at the curricula and methodology of American classrooms does not hurt. Rather, we can learn from their strategies and accomodate them to benefit the homeschool environment.

The four teachers, Nancy Goodwin, Martha Christian, Paul Sullivan, and Sheri Maeda, unanimously agree that performance is where it's at! "The preferred method," says these Shakespearean scholars, "is the preparation of scenes by groups of student-performers" (145).

In an overcrowded classroom environment, performance is probably an activity that follows much ice-breaking and disintegration of students' affective filters. However, in the homeschool environment, unbridled performance is easier to achieve. Performing strips the labels of "student and teacher" and allows families to be performers, actors, and audience.

Of course, performing scenes is a huge time-consumer, especially in the public school environment. With some sadness, McDonald admits that "the emphasis on performance has led to the practice of teaching parts of plays" (145).

Luckily for the homeschool community, we have ample time to read, rehearse, and perform scenes. (Think you're wasting time "only" teaching Shakespeare? Read the article about creating Shakespearean unit studies!)

In addition, we can carefully and jointly choose which play to cover. But how do we choose?

Martha Christian would say that Othello is a hit because it "is a powerful catalyst for serious [...] discussion," while others would say that it depends on the students and the mood of the "class" (146).

Paul Sullivan suggests that "it's not the play that determines the success of failure but the teaching methodology." Sullivan stresses the need to become confident "putting the works in the hands of the students and guiding them towards sources or opportunities to interpret and to make meaning" out of the texts (147).

As homeschooling parents. most of us are quite comfortable putting work in the hands of children and seeing what they do with it. The reading of Shakespeare can be an experience where the family holds Shakespeare and guides each other to read it and perform it to the collective vision of the group. But, despite the intimate family connection to Shakespeare's plays, many parents still shudder at confronting the bard's elevated and often puzzling language.

What do I say when my child asks what 'salad days' are? How do I interpret that crazy word that is highly suspected of being a clever pun?

Nancy Goodwin shares the pain: "The biggest problem in teaching Shakespeare is the language barrier" (148). However, Sullivan would disagree: "The language is less of an obstacle in performance-based teaching because there is such a powerful incentive to produce clarity for an audience" (148).

In a homeschool environment, a comfortable performance-based reading environment would also draw out questions about word meaning and usage. Because we're graced with more time, we can double as word hunters and read through footnotes or the OED for reference. Stumbling across a difficult word is also a good opportunity to teach our children how to find the answers they need, whether through careful thinking, analysis, and/or referring to another text (dictionary, footnotes, OED) for assistance.

Russ McDonald also posed the question: To what do students respond when studying Shakespeare?

Martha Christian claims that "[i]ntroductory acting exercises with subtext, subsequent acting, video-scene assignments, and comparisons of scenes in professional videos to their own video scenes" were highlights of her course (148). In the same way, performing Shakespeare in a comfortable environment and creating characters and staging organically can brighten our homeschool experience with Shakespeare.

With all the vast opportunities and "bunny trails" that reading Shakespeare can inspire in homeschool families, it's no wonder that many families focus on one play a year, but thread it through all 12 months as a current outlet for learning. Because Shakespeare's works are so multi-faceted and layered, the possibilities for study are endless.

The bottom-line, unanimous feeling is that Shakespeare is best taught as a collective performance, and the homeschool environment is certainly conducive to that. Children who dream of directing can even manage the camera while budding artists can be set designers if the family is not entirely made up of full-time thespians at heart.

Works Cited

Allen, Genevieve. "Shakespeare Performance 2010 of A Midsummer Night's Dream." Homeschool Performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Forte Academy of Tacoma Piano Studio and Homeschool Classes 19 Nov 2011 http://www.teachergenne.com/index.html.

McDonald, Russ. "Shakespeare Goes to High School: Some Current Practices in the American Classroom." Shakespeare Quarterly. 46:2. (1995) 145-156. JTSOR.

Shakespeare: Ought to Be Taught, Or Not?

With homeschool, we have the freedom to focus on liberal arts in a society that is quickly sweeping the works of great authors under the rug. As authors and editors of our children's curricula, we also have the freedom to cut out whomever we choose, for whatever reason. Thus, with the ability to include and exclude, should we continue to teach Shakespeare?

Many critics bash the works of Shakespeare for their historical and political undertones or painfully glaring racism and sexuality. Still, the beauty of Shakespeare is that the magnifying glass can be situated by myriad hands. We can focus, if we're brave, on the racist issues in Othello or we can discuss the exquisite language and dazzling metaphors glinting on the pages of all his plays, sonnets, and poems. The variety of lens and frames for Shakespeare are as varied as the people who teach his work.

To "[b]anish Shakespeare," says Professor Robert F. Wilson, would be to "banish the world of poetic truth, felicity, and debate." In expelling Shakespeare due to some problematic topics, well-meaning parents would be depriving their children of some of the best writing of all time, a beautiful dissection of the human soul.

Once homeschooling parents decide to tackle the bard's massive amount of work, they often wonder, where do I begin? how do I begin? On what exactly do I focus? These questions echo the same queries made by scholars and teachers for centuries. Each teacher of Shakespeare brings their own individuality to it. Professor Wilson emphasizes that "[l]ike the actor or director faced with performance choices, the teacher of Shakespeare drama must decide on how he or she will guide students in the interpretation and appreciation of the plays."

Hopefully, through exploring this blog and throwing your own ideas around, you can construct your own approach to teaching Shakespeare. But when readings get dense and students begin to balk, remember Professor Wilson's four reasons why Shakespeare ought to be taught:

1. He is among the few dramatists whose work is studied in-depth in American university English departments.

So if your child has dreams of continuing onto a university, he or she will meet the bard again. Opening the college doors with some well-placed Shakespearean experience in their brains will help.

2. His plays and sonnets offer rich material for the study of prosody--the study of metrical versification.

And his is a beautiful example from which to study prosody.

3. Shakespeare can serve [us] in another important area--criticism.

Again, the variety of frames are plentiful. You can choose to use historical criticism, feminist criticism, deconstructionist criticism, etc. The possibilities are endless.

4. Shakespeare is central to film studies.

Students nowadays tend to be visually-oriented; thus, watching Shakespeare's characters and drama come to life on screen is powerful.

Sit back with your favorite cup of tea and explore this blog for more inspiration on bringing Shakespeare to your homeschool curriculum.