Choose Your Own Adventure: Embracing Student-Selected Readings in the General Education Shakespeare Course

The promotion of student agency is central to learner-centered pedagogy and especially important for a trauma-informed approach. One effective method of empowering students is to involve them in a course’s overall design, including its reading list. This paper describes how I transformed my lecture-based Introduction to Shakespeare—which many students at my land-grant institution choose to fulfill general education requirements—into a course that depends on, and finds energy in, student-selected readings. In the on-campus version of the course, most classroom hours are devoted to peer writing workshops and “reading practice”—sessions in which we collectively work through whichever scene in that week’s assigned play received the highest number of votes on our class website. In our culminating “choose your own adventure” unit, there is no assigned play: each student determines for themselves which one they will read, with or without my recommendations. The sheer multiplicity of texts in play during our final unit precludes any fantasy of “being on the same page” and requires that we pivot away from collaborative close readings and toward “big picture” conversations. In my course, those conversations center on Shakespeare’s colonial legacy and ongoing prominence in American education and involve activities that ask students to contextualize their own experiences with Shakespeare in light of this history. Because the choose your own adventure unit is the most overtly outcomes-driven—it does not even attempt to “cover” content in the form of a play, but instead foregrounds the development of specific student skills—I found it the easiest to develop for effective asynchronous online education. This in turn speaks to the opportunities inherent in online pedagogy for Shakespeare instruction to not only incorporate student choice, but also activate student knowledge in ways that better reveal Shakespeare’s role in shaping specific educational communities.