Engaging Shakespeare

I am so excited about all of this that I want to share this video about our curriculum here, even though we are going to post it on YouTube and it is already on the group blog. We have worked really hard on our curriculum and artwork and it is all coming together quite well.

Along with posting our Shakespeare curriculum on our blog and on cnx.org, the Shakespeare class is going to have an event called Engaging Shakespeare in order to show off the class' final projects....including ours! We are going to have a gallery of all of our artwork, and I am pretty excited to see everyone else's projects. JJ put up a nice progress report about our Shakespeare evening, which has a preview for the play/documentary groups and other information. But, here is the basic information:

Friday, December 9

7:00 p.m.

B192 JFSB

I really hope that people can come and that teachers also take advantage of the curriculum resource that we are making available online!

Hamlet Art Production....GO!

My final project group is swiftly underway and we have all already started creating artwork concerning Act I of Hamlet. However, we have a group blog that we are posting on, so I think I am going to try and update periodically here, as well as continue to discover King Lear, but the bulk of the art and curriculum postings will be found on the Art and Shakespeare blog.

I have also been thinking a lot about the curriculum aspect of this project, and am concerned about what direction we will be able to take. So, I have been doing a little research about what is out there. I mentioned a movie in a previous blog post that I watched in an Art Education class about a year ago, and not only did I figure out what it was called, The Hobart Shakespeareans, but I also found a website connected to this classroom. I was going to paraphrase a bit about them, but I really like what it says on the front page of the website:

All of the children at Hobart Elementary School qualify for free breakfast and lunch, and few speak English as a first language. Many are from poor or troubled families. What's the winning recipe? A diet of intensive learning mixed with a lot of kindness and fun. These children come to school at 6:30 a.m. and often stay until it is dark. They come during vacation. They take field trips all over the world. They play rock and roll music. Mediocrity has no place in their classroom. And the results follow them for life, as they go on to outstanding colleges.

They have done A LOT of shows! And, their press page is pretty prolific. Their teacher, Rafe Esquith, has really inspired his students to excel. Will Power!

Hamlet and Art Production Themes

Here are some ideas that I have brainstormed for art lessons over the past couple days. The nice thing is that Hamlet has a lot of interesting themes that plenty of artist, both now and in the past, have dealt with. Obviously these need to be fleshed out more, but I wanted to get this out there to start the ball rolling:

Hamlet/Art Themes

Gender: "Frailty, thy name is woman," (Act I scene ii) Historical applications: Woman's suffrage, Feminism, Media Influences on Gender Contemporary Art/Art History: Renaissance Art, Guerilla Girls,Margaret Kilgallen Production: Painting, Poster Design

Disease/Decay: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." (Act I scene iv Contemporary Art: Decay Porn (not real porn, just documenting decay), Mark Webb Production: Time Lapse Photography, Still-Life

Madness: "How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself, As I perchance h

ereafter shall think meet To put on antic disposition on" (Act I scene v) Contemporary Art/Art History: Color Issue #47, "A Beautiful Mind," Vincent van Gogh Production: Portraits, Performance art

Mortality: "And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" (Act II scene ii), "To be, or not to be: that is the question..." (Act III scene i) Exploring death Contemporary Art/Art History: Symbolism (Edvard Munch, Carlos Schwab, John Henry Fuseli, Arnold Boecklin), Oliver Herring (knitting) Production ?

Final Project: Art and Shakespeare Curriculum

I have a lot of ideas floating in my head, so hopefully I can put my thoughts into words.

Thought 1: The theme that has really come out of my Shakespeare work/blogging is "All the World's a Stage." I realized that nowadays that means something a little different than in Shakespeare's era, especially with the internet (check out my family internet influence movie). So, I have been thinking about putting yourself out there to be an influence for good online.

Thought 2: I am currently in my last semester of classes for Art Education, so I have been focusing a lot on curriculum. I have been converted to the "curriculum as lived" idea, that learning is not simply in the classroom, but all around us, and if we open our minds, we can be influenced by so many different things for good. So, for my curriculum class, I have started to work through art lesson ideas that are inspired by Shakespeare. I actually just remembered

that I even watched a short documentary about teaching Shakespeare in the art classroom a couple of years ago...so I need to find that too.

Thought 3: Mason has this awesome idea about creating a Shakespeare Art Gallery, and I think that it would work great to combine these two ideas. There could be two possible ways that these could be combined. One would be that we would create art based on different plays or ideas within the play, and then create curriculum as a result of the art. The other way would be to have different ideas from Shakespeare for curriculum, create the curriculum, and then do the art. Or we could do a bit of both.

Thought 4: Not only could we show our artwork somewhere public, but we could put all of

our art and curriculum up on the web. I know there are sites to post your lesson plans as a teacher, but I want to figure out the best possible way to do this, so that we can successfully share globally and make this worthwhile. And, I really like the idea of sharing this with

teachers in Utah: we will just have to find someone with Shakespeare leaning!

I think if all of this comes together, then it could be an awesome project - and definitely one that so many other people can benefit from. Below is the lesson plan that I created for the "Seven Ages of Man" set out in As You Like It. I have also been thinking about other lesson plan ideas, but I think it would be cool to have a variety of things from a variety of plays/themes within plays.