Teaching Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century

In this Introduction, Sasser and Atwood introduce the purpose of this collection and provide an overview of its contributing chapters. This collection considers a common task—teaching Shakespeare in service or general education courses—that is often seen as obligatory, perfunctory, and ancillary to the primary goal of research and upper-level teaching. Instead of believing that general educational courses require basic or introductory professional abilities, we demonstrate throughout this collection the need for a more nuanced understanding of the great wealth of ways such courses can be taught in colleges and universities. While most, if not all, of the teaching books on Shakespeare currently on the market assume its readers teach upper-level courses, teaching Shakespeare outside of the major demands its own praxis, its own theory, and its own pedagogy. Teaching eight plays to a junior English major in a single-author course is neither the same rhetorical space nor the same pedagogical experience as teaching one play to lower-classmen or business majors, and should not be treated as such. The essays in this volume engage with pedagogical theories and practices that inform how we teach students in general education courses who are often freshmen and sophomores, non-majors, or are enrolled in otherwise non-traditional educational environments, such as service-learning courses. Further, these essays demonstrate that we can and must ground pedagogy in intellectual rigor that addresses contemporary critical debates about topics such as gender identity, racial justice, environmental conservation, and cultural production while still adapting to the new labor and digital conditions of twenty-first-century academia.