Today we launched project #3 for the seniors. The base of this project came from the PBLU.org website as I am taking their courses this semester. I chose to adapt the Cyrano's Funk project in a few ways to fit Macbeth.
I think the launch went well....better than expected I have to admit. The seniors seemed engaged and interested especially when we started bringing in and discussing social media.
So to start this project out we went through the following steps: (Any resources mentioned are listed at the end of this post).
Step 1) I gave students a scene from Taming of the Shrew to start our discussion of why we "fear" Shakespeare. They had to annotate the text as they read marking the phrases or words they thought they knew or recognized along with writing their best guess at a meaning. Then they also had to mark the things they didn't understand or recognize. After annotating they had to answer two questions (a) why do we "fear" Shakespeare? What makes it difficult to understand? And (b) What can we do to overcome our fears/obstacles and learn to understand Shakespeare?
Step 2) Upon returning to class students were asked to review their annotations and answers. Then we went through the annotation together on the computer marking everything people understood and didn't understand. We did not really focus on the meaning of the text because that wasn't the intended purpose of the exercise. When we finished we looked at our class annotated text and moved on to answer the two questions and put our "fears" and strategies up on the board. Once discussion started to slow down on the last question I posed a new one. "So, why don't we (yes even me) read Shakespeare in our free time?" And beautifully one student answered,"because we can't relate to it." Perfect transition...
Step 3) After that discussion and getting our lists on the board I challenged the students comment about relating to classic literature, or as they put it "those OLD stories". I told them that's why our goal for this project is going to be to "Modernize Macbeth". I explained that we'd be looking at using various forms of technology to "translate", understand, and adapt/create modern adaptations of Macbeth to share with others and help them understand and relate to the story's themes to modern social issues.
Step 4) After giving them an idea of what we'd be doing I pulled up some examples of modernization on the computer. We looked at a blog post that talks about a Twitter performance of Taming of the Shrew and I showed them Kate's twitter account and we pulled a few lines from Feb 13th that matches up with dialogue in the scene we read. We looked at a blog that is supposed to be written by Juliet and a playlist on GrooveShark that was supposed to be created by Romeo complete with the opening song, "Foxy Lady". This really got the students talking about different types of social media and technology that they might be able to use, which was exciting.
Resources Used:
Taming of the Shrew on Twitter
Article--http://mybigcampus.com/items/shakespeare-and-twitter-make-an-odd-couple---4795689?u57efbcb0-3a94-0130-4ab8-02aa22cab53c
Katherine--https://twitter.com/ShrewKate
Romeo and Juliet Blog:
http://julietisthesun.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2006-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2007-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=5
Romeo Montague GrooveShark playlist:
http://grooveshark.com/#!/playlist/Romeo+And+Juliet/61494496
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