Abstract
This article outlines Sounding Shakespeare, an interdisciplinary project in Music and English, carried out with student teachers in Norway. The aims of the project are to explore and develop new ways of working with Shakespeare cross-curricularly through educational design research, focusing on creative and aesthetic processes in order for student teachers to gain experience in working across subjects, and to decrease their fear factor of using Shakespeare in the classroom. The current curriculum changes in Norwegian primary and secondary education (Fagfornyelsen) focus on experimentation, exploration and creative processes, and these are guiding educational principles that also provide a foundation for the Sounding Shakespeare project. Our research into student teachers’ experiences of working with Shakespeare’s texts, constitute the starting point for this article. In the project, students worked in two different workshops with Speech and Music Composition to collaborate and devise a performance based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream as their focus text. Through voice and prosody, students explored the musicality of Shakespeare’s text, and through music composition, students experimented with soundscapes in creative processes. In the final part of the workshops, students collaborated towards performances. Based on our collected data, our main finding shows how music can become a guiding agent for a meaningful experience of literature.
Highlights
In Norwegian primary and secondary education, pupils start learning English from the first grade, but they will often not encounter Shakespeare’s texts until later grades, if at all
We found that the component most in focus had been the music composition, and we wanted the project to entail a speech composition for the design to be more interdisciplinary
Our data show that the participants who worked with Shakespeare’s text through music first (Group B) had a different experience of the text when working with the language in the second workshop than group A who worked with language first and music
Summary
The workshop design was in line with the subjects of English and Music and included elements from both school subjects’ national curricula in Norway. Such embodied experience is what Stoltz notes as being the way we “‘come to’ an understanding of something from our point of view” (485) since our engagement with the world and how we learn and create meaning are not just cognitive or theoretical processes, they are practical, aesthetic and affective (Stoltz; Dahl and Østern) Those who worked on the speech composition first, noted a stronger need for textual analysis or actual sense-making for each word when creating the music composition. When the participants worked on the text first, they transferred this need for textual interpretation and understanding to their second workshop with music composition This group encountered more challenges with the creative process since music cannot provide meaning in the same way as voice can (when reciting or singing the words). One participant noted that they were more positive towards Shakespeare in this way, and that it was not “dry or boring as it used to be,”[22] and another wrote that “I think it was surprisingly easy to work with Shakespeare’s text in this workshop.”[23]
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