About
About Shakespeare & Social Justice
Full Program Description
The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles (SCLA) Shakespeare & Social Justice (SSJ) Arts Education offers an ambitious vision for transforming how complex arts texts - specifically, Shakespeare’s works - can be taught. It combines social justice pedagogy and leading Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) educators in social justice from the Southern Poverty Law Center, arts education from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts Education, critical race theorists and scholars of early modern literature from Arizona State University’s RaceB4Race Institute, English language instruction from University of Houston’s Department of Education, master teaching artists, Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC, Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, the Houston Shakespeare Festival, educators from Los Angeles, Cambridge, San Diego, New York City, and Houston schools, and Washington, DC schools affiliated with partnering centers for the arts.
SSJ offers an urgent and innovative curriculum with principal and teacher training that illuminates Shakespeare’s text through social justice principles, with a particular emphasis on encouraging action against bias. While it is aligned with traditional standards-based study of Shakespeare, it draws upon SCLA’s decades of award-winning, nationally recognized social justice informed arts-based teaching strategies that incorporate human relations work designed to raise social awareness, advance anti-racist values and actions, and support pro-social youth development among low-income, disadvantaged youth attending Title One schools. SSJ Arts Education builds upon the highly successful three-decade track record of effectiveness addressing arts education for disadvantaged students (part of Competitive Priority).
Shakespeare and Social Justice Arts Education encompasses learning trajectories, and personal development for more than 1,000 youth ages 14-18 in youth enrichment programming, by making youth the leaders in their own education. Students in WPY (over 95% are low income and people of color), are guided by SCLA trained Teaching Artists experienced in facilitating in-depth dialogue with youth about pressing issues in their lives, by exploring Shakespeare’s characters, plays, themes and conflicts. They build confidence and multiple literacy skills through playwriting, acting, and, most of all, the Dialogue Groups that inspire students’ personal expressions of their lived experience while drawing from the situations found in Shakespeare’s plays. Youth write and perform their own versions of Shakespeare scenes after decoding and paraphrasing Shakespeare through use of the Oxford English Dictionary and Shakespeare lexicons, a critical step to ownership of the English language and to the ultimate end of “re-storying” these texts in their own vernacular. Through the personalization of Shakespeare’s text in a community cohort of 30 youth with similar economic and academic barriers, they build a foundation of anti-racist understanding.
These WPY elements are at the heart of SSJ, which will develop one curriculum unit each year (Y1-5) centered on social justice themes embedded in Shakespeare’s plays, such as racial identity and otherness, or the locus of power and security. It will excavate Shakespeare’s works in tandem with research-based frameworks for engaging youth in academics and teaching arts and social justice. Each SSJ unit will consist of multiple mini-modules, with each curriculum module paired with a teacher training module. By the end of year 5, SSJ will facilitate teacher training for 500 teachers through national engagement of partner theater companies. In year 5, we will get SSJ accredited and more broadly disseminate it to teachers. SCLA is a national nonprofit with staff in Los Angeles and Nashville, with programming for disadvantaged youth provided in CA, that is taught and replicated in TX, MO, and VA (Competitive Priority).