highlights from key national research on arts education

Champions of Change: Studies

Stand and Unfold Yourself: A Monograph of the Shakespeare & Company Research Study

Steve Seidel
Harvard Project Zero from a report produced by the staff of the Shakespeare & Company Research Study

One of the purposes of professional theater company, Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, is to teach Shakespeare at elementary through college levels of education. The ways of teaching that the company uses are based on their approach to rehearsing, performing, and training their actors. This approach is quite unlike typical classroom education.

"'Stand and unfold yourself' (one of the opening lines from Hamlet) has come to epitomize the work of Shakespeare & Company's education programs. First, that work is physical: it is about standing up. But it goes further. The work is also about 'unfolding' and opening oneself�to the highest level of literacy, to Shakespeare's language, to the ideas and meanings contained in his words, to other people. At the same time, it is about standing and embodying the work. It is about revealing oneself�taking risks, and accepting and embracing the vulnerability inherent in those risks. It is about moving away from a sleepy, protective posture of being folded up, or folded into oneself, and moving toward a tall, open, awake, and graceful stance." (p80-81)

While nearly every high school graduate has been expected to read one of Shakespeare's works, little research existed regarding the efficacy of how well students have learned the material and connected to Shakespeare in general. (p.81-82) Researchers, therefore, studied two of the company's programs over two years through school visits�observing sessions, attending student performances, interviewing teacher and student participants, reviewing written materials, and talking with program faculty and administrators. Three questions guided the study: Why do these programs work so well?  What is it participants are actually learning? What is critical to the success of these programs? (p.80)

Some of the findings from the report include:

• Acting out texts creates compelling learning experiences for students that also benefit parents and the broader community. Students in the Shakespeare & Company program learn Shakespeare's difficult texts through the process by which an actor analyzes and works with the text of a play and a company of actors in preparation for performance. In so doing the acting program meets the six criteria for rigorous and relevant project-based learning: authenticity, academic rigor, applied learning, active exploration, adult relationships, and assessment practices. "These performances are not simply school-room exercises: they are authentic acts of communication, culture, and community. When they are successful, they are demonstrations of deep understanding that make the complex and difficult world of Shakespeare's text lucid, vibrant, relevant, and moving to everyone in the auditorium." (p.84)
• Many students in a theater acting program reported that the intense review of Shakespeare texts in preparation for performing helped them not only master that difficult material but also improve their reading of other complex material such as math and physics texts. (p.82)
• The differences between poetic and scientific language underscore the value of arts education. "'What keeps it (the Shakespeare text), moment by moment, is that it is poetry.' Kevin Coleman, Director of Education insists. 'The individual words keep it complex. The complexity is inherent in the text moment by moment, word by word.' Coleman notes that language functions quite differently in our contemporary American culture. 'The language we are most familiar with tries to pin things down. This is why we feel it is so important to work with poetic language: poetic language versus scientific language, or even hopeless language or slang. Poetic language is expansive and opens up. Scientific language reduces. In our over-emphasis on science and math in schools, in our love affair with technology, we have left our imaginations impoverished.'" (p.83)

Stand and Unfold Yourself: A Monograph of the Shakespeare & Company Research Study is one of seven major studies compiled in Champions of Change produced by the national Arts Education Partnership, the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, the GE Fund, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.