Enhancing Creative Engagement with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, and Othello and Gen-Z Culture

Teaching Shakespeare to non-majors is one of the most rewarding tasks an English professor can embrace. Students who are not English majors offer fresh new ways of seeing and interpreting material, and they are not attached to a particular meaning in the same way that students who are familiar with Shakespeare are. Nevertheless, teaching non-majors can be challenging because of students’ lack of familiarity with Shakespeare’s language. In an age where ways of communicating are ever shorter and oversimplified, the need for students to experience the rich complexity and beauty of Shakespearean language is particularly pressing. Through a combination of exercises that encourage close-reading and attention to word choice, students can begin to understand the context in which Shakespeare was writing and think more deeply about interpretative possibilities. Students can then transmit their newly acquired knowledge through digital sources, social media, and creative projects. Ultimately, such projects indicate that modern-day students can still find Shakespeare’s work meaningful and relevant. In my essay, I share the ways in which I use creative approaches to teach students close-reading. Paying attention to the meaning of particular words, as well as their implications, is one of the hardest skills to teach. For students to understand that words reflect worldview, and that choice of words reveals character, they need to learn how to tackle difficult passages and unpack imagery and metaphor. I employ a combination of fun and non-competitive exercises to encourage engagement with Shakespeare’s words and stimulate students’ own creativity. For instance, they can then use social media to demonstrate their understanding and interpretation of characters and themes, since each social media outlet is different and can serve a unique purpose. Further, I use Pinterest to organize Shakespeare-related sources, curiosities, fun facts, and media I can share with students. I also assign creative social media projects, and in my article, I explore a few examples of the ways in which projects can reveal a sophisticated understanding as well as students’ creative interpretation and expression.