A Midsummer Night's Dream: A pedagogical perspective

For my Master's thesis I elected to weave in and out of a scholarly and pedagogical dissection of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. As a Masters student in the English department I felt that my thesis would be my one last piece of scholarly writing before I pursue my career of teaching English literature at the high school level. I was also aware of the fact that if I were to write an exclusively scholarly thesis on the physiology of looking, the connection between drugs, dreams, and theatre- three different yet similar vulnerable and unguarded states- the anti-theatrical and anti-herbal uprisings of early modern England juxtaposed to those of classical Athens, and other topics of personal interest in A Midsummer Night's Dream, it would be of little benefit to me when staring at a class full of sixteen-year olds. On the flip side, to write an exclusively pedagogical approach would be a disservice to me, considering my passion for renaissance literature, and to my students.;In the article "What is Literacy?" (One of the founding documents of "New Literacy Studies"), Professor James Paul Gee defines literacy and various approaches to maximize the potential of a classroom. The article begins by defining some key concepts which repeatedly make their way into my lesson plans.;Gee begins by defining "acquisition" and "learning". Acquisition is a method of attaining knowledge through natural occurrences/environments. The information is processed directly to the subconscious. Learning is a way of taking in information through a structured series of steps and filtering it consciously. Gee encourages educators to teach students through a combination of acquisition and learning. By doing this we make the students comfortable in an area of study (regardless of subject) in which a comfort did not exist.;The way to naturalize the unnatural is to combine the student's primary discourse (home environment) with their secondary discourse (school). To present the literature exclusively according to definitions and plotline would be exclusively learning (strictly secondary discourse). In order to get the most out of my class, and the most out of the literature, I would have to weave their primary discourse with their secondary discourse. The goal is to bridge the gap between the two environments. This is a tough task considering how different the world is today than it was four hundred years ago in renaissance England...or is it?;There are a plethora of current adolescent issues students can relate to that arise in many of Shakespeare's plays, particularly A Midsummer Night's Dream. The issues of young love, arranged marriages, and erotic release can assist in the environment way of orienting the class to a fuller range of issues rather than just vocabulary. For example, the very first exercise in my lesson plans is a mapping exercise. In this exercise we have the students draw a map with places that they feel freedoms as opposed to places they feel repressed. This brings up the bigger picture of Natural vs. Civil Laws, both in Shakespeare's time as well as today. It raises questions such as: What can you learn in the conventional that you cannot in the unconventional? Where do we find the delicate balance where we have enough rules so that people are not repressed but still maintain civil order? Should sympathy override the law? This simple exercise raises questions which in turn incorporate the student's personal lives to the differences between the extreme law of Athens and the extreme license of the woods.;In order to understand and relate to the issues in the play the class must first get comfortable with the language. That is the main issue high school students have with Shakespeare. "What does that mean?" followed by "Well why doesn't he just say that?" are arguably the most frequently asked questions a high school English teacher will have to face when teaching Shakespeare. Analyzing literature brings me great joy, but we were all in that seat at one point in our lives. Those long nights, sitting over our Folger paperback editions, pulling the hairs out of our heads in frustration, completely baffled at the fact that what we are looking is considered English. In order to get comfortable with the matrix of Shakespearean English and make people realize it arises from a system of language and values I will have them partake in exercises. These exercises include lessons on the rhythm of Shakespeare's language juxtaposed to that of modern day hip-hop, geography-spacial and social conventions, values, and so on. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...