Emily Wheatman (EW): Could you tell us a bit more about your recent research, Time to Act?
Jacqui O’Hanlon (JO): Absolutely. We have over 15 years of long-term partnership work with primary and secondary schools across England (funded by Arts Council England). Across all of that activity we kept seeing two key themes emerge from teacher-reported impact. The first was children's literacy, particularly speaking, listening and writing. Whenever teachers would do action-research or give feedback, we’d always be surprised by how much our pedagogy and Shakespeare's language had really made a significant difference to the kinds of language the children were using in speech and in their writing, or the kinds of expressiveness that non-verbal children were using. The other key theme we saw was about the change in children's academic self-concept. And by that I mean the way the child thought about themselves as a learner; their attitude to school.
When we were awarded a research grant by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, we asked teachers what would be most useful. The response we received was that teachers really need concrete data to prove to those who aren't used to an arts-rich curriculum that these improvements are happening. So we established a randomised control trial. And the results really did give us hard data about the changes happening in terms of the children's lexis; it gave us a much more sophisticated understanding of the improvements that happen when you combine Shakespeare's language with theatre-based pedagogies in the classroom. And that, again, has changed the kinds of conversations we're able to have at a policy level with government departments as well as with teachers and senior leaders. So that we can all be really confident about the differences this kind of work makes.
EW: What are your next steps with that research?
JO: We’d like to do a larger-scale version of that randomised control trial, but we're also incorporating those findings into our programme of continued professional development. We've developed a sandwich course for teachers in three stages: a foundation, intermediate and advanced level. We call it a certification programme in ‘The Teaching of Shakespeare’, and that's available for all teachers at all levels, ages and stages. We want to work with as many teachers as possible, so we also operate an outreach programme where we will go to any school, anywhere in the UK to work with a group of teachers in that school or a group of teachers from across a cluster of schools. You can find out all about that on the RSC website [rsc.org.uk].
EW: You've previously mentioned that the rehearsal room forms a large part of your pedagogy. Can you explain how that works?
JO: We draw direct parallels between teaching and learning about Shakespeare in a classroom with the way that actors and directors work on a play in a rehearsal room. We talk a lot about embodying the text, and what we mean by that is bringing our whole selves to the exploration of interpreting the text. There's a visceral aspect to understanding Shakespeare's language; it can't be all deciphered in our heads. In a rehearsal room, we focus on exploring the interpretive choices in the text.
Shakespeare doesn't give us many answers. His plays ask loads of questions, and it's the job of the director and the actors to find the answers to those questions. The way we do that is in a creative environment of playfulness where we're inhabiting the characters. We're thinking about things like the circumstances, the context, the facts that we know about the play; the facts that we know about the characters. And then we're also thinking about what we need to interpret. There isn't a right and wrong, which is what can be so empowering for young people, because as long as they can justify it in the text, they're just as right as Peter Hall or any famous actor that's approached these plays.
EW: What do you make of the recent Oracy Commission report?
JO: What's fascinating to me about the relationship between theatre pedagogies and oracy is they are dialogic. As theatre practitioners, we know that everything is rooted in the dialogue between our students, their teachers and each other. And so everything that's in the Oracy Commission report is in every Shakespeare classroom that's run on a rehearsal room basis. In fact, I’d argue that every arts lesson is, because the arts are fundamentally interpretive, and that means they're fundamentally dialogic because they're about us in relation to the art. An important clarification that Geoff Barton (chair of the Commission) made was that we mustn't make the mistake of thinking that oracy is verbal. Oracy is all forms of communication. So it's about how all non-verbal children and verbal children in our education system are able to find their expressiveness. This report is a fabulous opportunity.
EW: What are your future plans for education at the RSC?
JO: Something that we're currently prototyping is a new form of a Shakespeare curriculum. It would be an online platform that will put the student in the creative driving seat when it comes to making decisions about Shakespeare's work. It was a response to a strategic review where we found that the area we could make the biggest impact would be how Shakespeare is experienced in the secondary classroom. We want to focus on how we can use Shakespeare to unlock the potential of young people, not diminishing the importance of textual analysis, but to think about the majority of students who may benefit from a different journey into the text that identifies it as a play and recognises all the interpretative choices that can be made. We're still fundraising and building the prototype; so watch this space.
Time to act research: https://tinyurl.com/msk7cdkw