On February 6th from 2-3pm, I attended Dr. Willnide Lindor’s talk “Making Shakespeare Sexy Again: Pedagogical Approaches to Race and Empire,” in Old Main. I was extremely interested in attending this event because I take a class with Dr. Lindor and she’s been one of my favorite professors here at SUNY Cortland because of her passion for her subject, and her active engagement with her students.
While sitting in at this event, many subjects were brought to my attention that I really hadn’t thought of before. Dr. Lindor discussed the difficulty around making Shakespeare something enjoyable or interesting for her students of color. Dr. Lindor explained that typically she’s noticed that her African American students are unable to make a connection with Shakespeare because of background ethnic differences. She further stated that “black students are not the intended reader of Shakespeare” and that, “Shakespeare is the embodiment of whiteness.” I found this very interesting. As someone who plans on entering the field of adolescent education, I’m very conscious of the fact that I will more than likely teach Shakespeare in my future classroom. I think of the stigma around Shakespeare; that it’s confusing and most students aren’t interested in it because of the language. However, although obvious, I had never before thought of Shakespeare’s intended audience: it had never really been said out loud. As Dr. Lindor discusses, it’s no mystery why she found that her African American students had difficulty forming a connection with texts written by Shakespeare.
After providing us with some background information, Dr. Lindor then dove into her strategies for teaching Shakespeare. She explained that by understanding how students are introduced to Shakespeare that teachers are better able to understand the background that multicultural students bring to the college classroom. She says that incorporating a race conscious pedagogy allows students to thrive in their education within the realm of Shakespeare. Dr. Lindor then introduced us to her “Experience Retrieval Exercises.” ERE’s, as she calls them, are activities where students share information about previous knowledge about a topic regardless of the education level. Dr. Lindor then asked us to participate in an ERE that she uses in her classes. In this ERE, we wrote down what we knew about Shakespeare on an index card in groups. Then, after a timer went off, Dr. Lindor collected our index cards, placed them in a bowl, shuffled them around, and picked out cards in a random order and read them aloud to the group. She explained that often times when she executed this activity in her Shakespeare classes, she found that students typically had a few negative associations and memories of Shakespeare but also some positive ones. Dr. Lindor said that as a class, hearing all of this different information from memory recall lays new touchstones for their future encounters with Shakespeare.
Ultimately, I learned a lot from Dr. Lindor’s talk. I think all adolescent teachers who teach Shakespeare definitely need to consider making it more inclusive. I think students learn best when they are able to relate to something, even in the smallest way, and for those who can’t I think Dr. Lindor’s strategies are an excellent way to help students become engaged in the work.
