Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose

<p>What does it mean to teach Shakespeare with purpose? It means freeing teachers from the notion that teaching Shakespeare means teaching everything or teaching Western Civilisation and universal themes. Instead this invigorating new book equips teachers to enable student-centred discovery of these complex texts. <p/>Because Shakespeare's plays are excellent vehicles for many topics -history socio-cultural norms and mores vocabulary rhetoric literary tropes and terminology performance history performance strategies - it is tempting to teach his plays as though they are good for teaching everything. This lens-free approach however often centres the classroom on the teacher as the expert and renders Shakespeare's plays as fixed determined and dead. <i>Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose</i> shows teachers how to approach Shakespeare's works as vehicles for collaborative exploration to develop intentional frames for discovery and to release the texts from over-determined interpretations. In other words this book presents how to teach Shakespeare's plays as living breathing and evolving texts.</p>