Shakespeare Pedagogy and Twenty-First Century Multicultural Sensibilities

Owing to the backlash against the tepid increase in the cultural studies approach to teaching of literary texts, many teachers in the academy have folded back to traditional text and aesthetic-centered pedagogies to escape accusations of teaching with an agenda. In teaching a text such as Othello without the appropriate cultural contexts, some teachers have noticed students falling back to assessing the text with prevailing social prejudices, thereby negating the idea that the learning process can be approached without any philosophical mitigation either by the teacher or the community in which the students belong. In Chelsea High School in Massachusetts for example, when asked to proffer reasons for Brabantio’s opposition to the Othello-Desdemona union, students responded that Brabantio was afraid that Othello would get his daughter pregnant. When asked further if race had anything to do with that assessment, students accused the teacher of racism and the topic was dropped. The revealing pedagogical takeaway from this incident is that the sensibilities of the white majority students were privileged over the potential for learning that this moment presented; conversely, the sensibilities and psychological wellbeing of the black students were sacrificed. Frank W. Brevik argues for a pedagogical approach involving what he calls “an American-Adamic Context” where students are essentially treated as blank slates. In contrast to this approach, one of the things I emphasize in my classes at Texas A&M is the reader-response centered criticism. This approach stems from my understanding that students bring into the classroom several mitigating influences, some of which are less than educated than the derided ‘agendas’ teachers are increasingly getting accused of. In this paper, I argue, with results from an experimental Shakespeare course I taught at Texas A&M, that to increase the attraction of Shakespeare’s dramatic opus to white students and students of color alike, and to make Shakespeare relevant to twenty-first century literature education, interrogating the ideological underpinnings of his plot structures must not be sacrificed in the interest of escaping accusations of having an agenda for the traditional text and aesthetic centered pedagogy.