High school teachers attend professor's campus workshop on Shakespeare

FIU recently hosted a professional development workshop aimed at bridging the gap between the high school and college experiences.

In collaboration with Miami Dade County Public Schools, the event brought together three dozen local secondary school teachers and speakers who suggested novel approaches to the works of William Shakespeare with the goal of cultivating connections and understanding in classrooms.

English Professor James M. Sutton moderated the workshop with the aim of showing teachers how they can make Shakespeare “kick” in high school environments. He and guest speakers shared how discussions around Shakespeare’s plays and characters can prompt self-reflection among teens and encourage them to talk about their own experiences.

“I don’t see a lot of division between the work that high school teachers do…and what I do. We’re asking the same questions…about how we teach these texts that are really important, rich and complex…and contend with their relevancy,” says Sutton.

Christopher Columbus High School teacher Kathryn Essig MA ’04 was blown away by the workshop. “I’m leaving here completely invigorated to go back into my classroom, sparked with all these different ideas of how I’m going to approach literature in a way that’s going to make it relatable to students. I really do feel like [this workshop] is going to make me a better teacher.”

The power of literature lies in opportunities to foster empathy and personal resilience, participants observed.

“Literature is the study of what it is to be a human being,” says Maria Ruiz-Legg, a teacher at the School for Advanced Studies. Studying literature helps students “step into another’s shoes and see things through their point of view,” which, in turn, facilitates communication, she argues. Even if you’re “a math person,” she tells her students, you’re still required to “interact with other people.”

Presenter Mardy Philippian, a professor of English at Lewis University and a contributor to a recent book on Shakespeare coedited by Sutton, agrees that reading about situations and challenges faced by people throughout the more than 400 years since Shakespeare wrote his plays has tremendous value.

“The more students come to understand that they can learn to identify in texts their own kinds of struggles and experiences, [the more] they start to realize, ‘Wait a minute, these things have been going on for millennia'.”