At Clapham School, every single middle school student is guaranteed to have a significant experience with Shakespeare through spending each spring semester studying and performing a Shakespeare play. As a classical school, Shakespeare is naturally part of our curriculum, but why? How does the Great Books canon serve our students, and in what way do they support and engage with a biblical worldview (stay tuned for even more on this in a future episode)? How can parents serve their students as they approach the formidable task of memorizing and performing lines in front of a live audience? Leah Becker and Hannah Bramsen discuss all this and more in this episode of the Clapham School Podcast.
Research increasingly suggests that engaging with and performing Shakespeare in the middle grades yields demonstrable benefits for students. Beyond fostering a deeper appreciation for classical literature, such programs:
- Sharpen cognitive faculties: Performing Shakespeare enhances executive functions, particularly working memory, and improves reading comprehension.
- Refine linguistic precision: Students studying Shakespeare have better composition scores, notably in their command and understanding of complex vocabulary.
- Cultivate emotional intelligence: By grappling with universal human experiences—ambition, guilt, grief, and love—through performance, students grow in their recognition and articulation of feelings they will certainly encounter someday if they haven’t already.
- Enhance verbal dexterity: Regular exposure to Shakespeare’s verse hones an appreciation for rhythm, metaphor, and diction, improving overall language proficiency.
- Promote collaborative skills: Staging theatrical productions naturally necessitates coordination, rigorous rehearsal, and mutual trust between students.
- Inspire a virtuous imagination: Through engaging with the classics, students see the fruits of virtue and vice through story. They are given a context in which to explore the gamut of human experience in a contained environment, along with opportunities to process the play with trusted faculty mentors.
- Cultivate taste: Students immersed in Shakespeare cultivate an awareness of excellence and beauty in art, ultimately equipping them to produce beautiful work themselves. At Clapham, Shakespeare often hits all three values of goodness, truth, and beauty in one complex composition.
- Increases confidence and grit: Pick up a Shakespeare play for the first time in several decades and experience the phenomenon of revisiting a foreign language. But our students become comfortable with Shakespeare, as they study it together under experienced hands. As Mrs. Bramsen says in our episode, because of Clapham’s curriculum, our students are not afraid of Shakespeare. They can do hard things, and they know it through experience.
Families with current or future middle schoolers won’t want to miss this episode, which yields several tips and ideas on how to make the most of the spring Shakespeare festival (Mrs. Bramsen even reveals what plays we’ll be enjoying this May).
Interested in learning more about Middle School at Clapham? Be sure to schedule a tour, or join us for our January Prospective Family Day!
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