Putting on those context spectacles

Context is such a tricky aspect of English teaching. Too much emphasis on context causes students to offload spurious facts and details. Too little emphasis on context and students make random statements and lots of misconceptions. How many times have we seen students proclaim that ‘all’ Victorians felt or thought something? The idea that society is just one collective thought and feeling is slightly chilling.   

I don’t deny that contextual knowledge is useful and helps to frame understanding, but its problem in English usually stems from the concrete nature of things. If we are thinking of knowledge in English, then the easiest knowledge students can secure is knowledge around context. The problem for English is that a lot of English is forming inferences. The key inferences we ask of students in English relate to three areas usually: 

• Inferences around the writer’s intent;

• Inferences around the reader’s reaction; 

• Inferences around the characters in the texts. 

Yes, you do need a lot of knowledge to form those inferences, but the thinking isn’t quite ‘concrete’. There’s a lot of supposition, guessing, and relating to past knowledge. A lot of the knowledge surrounding this stems from experience rather than direct teaching. This reminds me of a book I read and in it the character reacted the same way.  Contextual knowledge often sounds good in the students head but doesn’t relate to the inferences needed in most English essays, inferring the writer’s intent, the reader’s reaction or the character’s thoughts and feelings. That’s why we get knowledge dumps in essays. 

The other alternative has been to focus on the text as the source of contextual information. The text is simply a product of its time. This tends to be the way the exam board prefers, but it doesn’t make things so easy. If students are not used to exploring the text as a product of its time, then they don’t see it as that. Put any old show or film before a student and they’ll notice the dated effects, fashion, technology  or language. They don’t really explore the people and how attitudes towards gender or class have changed. Exhibit A: they all remember the word ‘squiffy’ in ‘An Inspector Calls’. Astute students can spot the aspects that reflect the time, but that’s a minority. 

I personally think there is a balance to be had. Students need some knowledge, but not too much and certainly not knowledge that is going to over complicate and problematise understanding. What do I mean by knowledge that problematises understanding? Take, for example, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Often, students are informed about the contextual history surrounding homosexuality in the Victorian age. This then, for some students, warps their understanding of the text. Instead of it being one possible interpretation of the text, it becomes the glue that links all ideas together. We can do more damage with some pieces of knowledge for some students. I think there should be a greater discussion of problematic knowledge in the same way we talk about misconceptions. They have the power to override all thoughts. 

It is the relationship that this contextual knowledge has with the writer and the text that needs to be at the forefront of the teaching. And, we need to work on making the writer a person and a concrete aspect. More concrete than the knowledge related to context. 

So, how, in theory, do I introduce context and make the writer seem concrete when discussing texts? 

Step 1 - The basics 

Firstly, I get students to watch a video as homework. I ask them to watch it before reading the text. I inform the class that I am going to test them on what they learn from the video. 

An Inspector Calls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fXw8lWWtlA

A Christmas Carol 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xRonangfz0&list=PLQTtyDJWDJDZns579hi1OGlYtktiFwstn&index=6

Then, I start the next lesson with a test. The link is below.  https://www.dropbox.com/s/mehkq1sxgncziiq/11%20Homework%20Questions%20to%20Context%20Video.docx?dl=0

This document is used repeatedly over the course of GCSEs. It forms revision and works as a constant reminder of key threads in the story. Initially, we throw the first copy away as students get quite a few wrong on the first go. The next time we do it, about a week later, I get them to make it neat as it will be the one that stays in their books. 

I start with this approach rather than use lots of exploratory texts, because students need a grounding of knowledge in the first instance. Whilst I think it is lovely and nice to show a few texts related to the period, it is rather ‘pin the tail on the donkey’. I could spend a lesson exploring hoping students would pick up attitudes towards class or I could tell them that attitudes towards class was an issue and then get them to explore how that idea is developed, explored in a painting or text. 

Step 2 - building the writer 

Unless you routinely get students to salute and bow to an image of the writer, the writer is a ghostly presence in the room. Some can see him/her. Others cannot. English teachers need to help students form a construction in their heads of the writer. They need a construction of the writer that makes them seem like a real person. Someone with an active presence in the text and the lesson. We are reading that writer’s manifesto. 

To construct that writer, I use the context sheet. If this was the world you were growing up in, what would you think? What would you want? What would you do in your writing to make society change? 

From this, we are able to construct ‘a construct’ of the writer. Of course, we are making inferences. 

Dickens was… 

• Protective of children and saw children as losing their childhood 

• Lost his childhood and so didn’t want others to lose theirs 

• Angry that there were very few options for the poor 

• Felt that the government wasn’t doing enough to help the weakest 

• Conscious of how money affected society 

• Felt that money controlled all aspects of our lives 

• Angry that the rich were profiteering from the poor 

• Interested in politics and read government reports 

• Aware of how easy and quickly someone could become poor 

• Aware of how people are determined to stay rich

From this, we had constructed an idea of this person. Students had an idea of who Dickens was as a person. They had this mantra for the book: 

Dickens thought Britain was broken and saw that his book could be the message to fix it. 

It became the default response when reading the text.  

Why does Dickens make the setting cold and foggy? Because Britain was broken, Dickens wanted to suggest how cold society was. The fog symbolises how they couldn’t see the problem and so there was no sense of things improving.  

By securing an initial understanding of the writer, we have something to frame ideas around. Therefore, their inferences developed and extended throughout the reading of the text. They’d start understanding that Dickens cared for the poor, but notice how he wasn’t really against the rich. But, what they had was a starting point to build inferences around the writer’s intent, which they can use to build and create their own. If students have knowledge of the primary intent, then they can explore secondary intentions. 

We spend so much time on character construction that we fail to address the biggest thing we want students to talk about - the writer. 

Step 3 - exploring the text 

Now that we have some threads to work with, I return back to this sheet and the construct of the writer routinely when looking at the text. They have a compass to guide their thinking and to work with. We put a lot of stock on their memory, but whilst reading a text we need to keep working on building connections. After reading a section, I will get students to link to the context or construct somehow. Or, I will start the reading with the idea from the construct: We know Dickens was political and supportive of the poor so what is he trying to do in this section? Politically? Socially? 

We talk about the writer as a person we are familiar with. As if he has just stepped out of the classroom and we are talking on his behalf. There is a presence in discussion. He isn’t an afterthought, which the teacher has to keep returning to when analysing the text. He is a fully rounded person to them. 

How we use knowledge is important in English. However, I think we need to use it carefully. Knowledge can build more knowledge, but we need to think more about how that knowledge builds. We need to work on demystifying the writer and we need to help students to form and create inferences on their thoughts, feelings, ideas and perspective. The biggest problem students have is talking about the writer’s intent. That’s because they have no concept of writers as real people. Let’s start helping students to see writers as real people, even if they might have been dead for a few years. Inference works on knowledge and we have to work on the two aspects in lessons.

Thanks for reading,  

Xris 

Controlling history or making it a bit more humane

A03: Show understanding of the relationships between texts and contexts in which they were written.

15% of the overall Literature GCSE is assessed on this one little assessment thread. The exam board have tried to define context and their idea is that it takes students outside the text. Context can refer to location, social structures and features, cultural contexts and periods of time. They have also simplified it the marking scheme to be ‘ideas/perspectives/contextual factors’. So, our students need to be aware of the context of ‘A Christmas Carol’, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘An Inspector Calls’ and ‘Power and Conflict poetry’. But, how do you make the contextual knowledge meaningful and appropriate in the long run?

We have taught all the key texts. We now have next term and a bit of the remaining term to get our Year 11s ready for the exams. Part of our revision plan next term is to make a booklet for students. Each lesson and each week will focus on different parts of necessary knowledge for the exams. It will include vocabulary, key quotes, terminology, genre features and contextual points. The idea is that we test and retest these bits of information again and again so we can commit to memory important information. Of course, you could say everything is important when studying a text, but for your average Year 11, we need to help them see what is appropriate and what isn’t appropriate when referring to the texts.

Every English teacher has had to plough through an historical information dump in an essay. Facts have been lifted and copied virtually word for word by the student. In fact, contextual information and facts are so tricky. One slight and insignificant piece of information warps a student’s understanding. Mention in passing that Shakespeare might have been a Catholic sympathiser in an odd lesson and you can guarantee that a student will find everything as a clue to Shakespeare being Catholic. He uses this word because he is Catholic. He includes a female character in this scene because he is Catholic. He sets it in this country because he is Catholic. Students shape texts to fit a contextual fact, rather than link texts to the context and explain them.

When I teach context, I do the usual stuff of read articles and other texts related to the historical context, but I tend to boil things down. Below is an example:    

An Inspector Calls: Context

Two Contexts

Edwardian – Setting of the play- 1912

·         Britain was seen as a very rich and prosperous nation.

·         Society insisted the rich and poor should not mix. Marrying or befriending a person of a different class would be a scandal.

·         Britain was clearly a class based society. The rich and the poor had their place and they couldn’t move.

·         The rich had more rights in society than the poor. The poor could be cruel to the poor and society accepted it.

·         Women couldn’t vote so the suffragette movement was started.

1945 – Play written and performed 

·         Britain had just experienced two world wars and was optimistic about the future

·         During the wars, rich and poor people fought together a common enemy.

·         Women played an important part during the war effort. Many had jobs or responsibility.

·         Many women lost their husbands due to the wars so there were some families without a male figure at the head of the house.

·         Rationing and two wars had left Britain quite poor. The rich were not as rich as they were before.

·         Women could vote.

I keep these points on a PowerPoint ready for use in lessons. At any given point, I might refer to these when reading a text. We’ve just read Act 1 so which on these points is most relevant here. How does the writer reflect this idea that women couldn’t vote? Where do we see it? Then, continue reading.

The contextual information is intertwined with the reading. The two are inseparable. Some contextual information might be important to know before reading. Other points might be relevant as and when events occur in the text. But, all the time, there should be a ping-ponging of context and reading. I watched a student teacher start of reading of ‘Lord of the Flies’ with a discussion of William Golding’s life. He said: ‘How do you think that would affect his writing? What sorts of story would he write?’ I recently listened to BBC radio documentary and I gleamed an interesting contextual point. Charles Dickens, at the time of planning ‘A Christmas Carol’, his family were asking to borrow money from him. Often they didn’t pay him back. He felt they were a drain.  

Students dump contextual information in their writing when we have separated in their minds. For years, I have always had the ‘An Inspector Calls’ context lesson. I showed students the BBC video and asked them to answer questions based on the video. In the last three years, I have started with the above list and asked students to memorise and then link to the text. I might pick one point and the get students to look at the text from that angle. I underline a key word so that they memorise that key word or phrase. Hopefully, when they remember the word ‘vote’ in the exam that will trigger the relevant information.

But teaching context can be a simple case of sentence structure. This year I have started using these sentences in writing:

Victorians believed….

Elizabethans felt ….

Some Elizabethans thought…

Edwardians considered….

Men, at that time, saw….

Women, at that time, were viewed as

It was expected that …

It was generally accepted that..

It was common to see …

It was an unwritten rule …

Society, at the time, expected ….

The great thing about using phrases like the above is that you start to make concrete the people of the time. A fact can be pretty inhuman. A belief. A notion. An ideology of the time is something more sophisticated and relatable. Take sexuality in the Elizabethan age. It is as complex as it is now. Elizabethans felt what towards sexuality. Repressed? Puritanical? Open? Heterosexual? Read a few sonnets see all those ideas are confirmed in part, because, just like today, some people think one thing and others think something else.   

The other thing to think about with context is relationships. At the heart of all texts is the relationship between people. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is about the relationship between the young and the old and between different groups of society. ‘An Inspector Calls’ is about the relationship between the young and the old and between the rich and the poor. ‘A Christmas Carol’ is about the relationships between the rich and the poor and the young and the old. Of course, there are so many more subtle or obvious relationships. What about the healthy and the ill in ‘A Christmas Carol’? Or, the confident and the shy in ‘An Inspector Calls’? Understand the relationships and you understand the context better. If you understand that the old controlled the young in Elizabethan society, you understand why Juliet’s actions are so important.

Contextual understanding could be just a word. I recently read a book about the Elizabethan age and one word stood out from the rest. Insecurity. The Elizabethan Age was a time of insecurity. Now, where do we see that insecurity in ‘Romeo and Juliet’? The unsettled nature of time is duplicated in every scene. Things could change at any minute. In fact, the whole play is constantly changing. In fact, you could relate all the plays of Shakespeare to this insecurity. They all end with a sense of security at the end. Normality is established by the end of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth’. Okay, probably a bit tenuous. However, having one word is powerful enough to develop an interpretation of the play’s context. The Prince is trying to make things stable. The struggles. In the end, people die and this causes stability.

Right, to the crux of this blog: I am writing this blog to see what people think are the most important contextual facts necessary for students to understand and develop effective interpretations of the texts.  I have included a bit of mine below. I am going to include a page or two for each text in the revision book, but I am really interested to see what you think is important. So, please create your own list or add points in the comments below.

Thanks for reading,

Xris

Romeo and Juliet: Context

1595

Women

•       Women had to rely on their husbands and fathers – they belonged to them. They were their property – to do as they wish

•       They couldn’t own property.

•       Queen Elizabeth did not marry as this would mean her husband had power over her.

•       A woman could not vote. They had no legal rights and did not have a chance of being educated.

•       The only career a woman had in society was marriage, which was organised by the father. 

•       A marriage wasn’t based on love and attraction but on financial security.  A marriage helped men get money through a dowry or built alliances between families.

•       Women could marry from the age of 12. Common in rich families.

A Christmas Carol: Context

1843

London and the Poor

•       The poor often had lots of children as it was expected a few wouldn’t reach adulthood.

•       There was a lot of migration from the countryside because of an economic depression. This caused heavy crowding in the cities.

•       Overcrowding meant continuous diseases – typhus, diphtheria, scurvy, small pox, cholera 

•       Life expectancy in London was only 27 years.

•       Everywhere in London there was evidence of physical diseases – small pox, malnutrition, etc.

•       Children were constantly dying. Half the registered deaths were children.  

Questioning the questions

This is a blog about my talk for the TLT13, which took place yesterday at Southampton University. Before I even start I will apologise now if there are any typos or errors. In total, this weekend, I have spent eight hours driving. But, it was worth it, even if it has left me a bit frazzled, and with a brain that is barely functioning – my tweets are clear evidence of this.

Anyway, TLT13 was great. A hotpot of teaching goodness and a shot in the arm to any tabloid newspaper which thinks teachers are greedy-money-grabbing-parent-hating-time-wasting-cheats. Loads of teachers gave up their Saturday to look at ways to make teaching better. For all the comments about teachers who strike ruining the education, this day was an antidote or a big gesture of two fingers to the negative perception of teachers. The whole thing focused on being the ‘best’. Gove wants the best education system, but assumes teachers do not want that. He assumes that we are lazy and feckless. Case for the defence: evidence 1.2 – TLT13.

I would love to list all the teachers I met yesterday, but I am worried I would cause offence by missing someone out. It was great. I will just leave it at that. So, what did I talk about? Questions.

Questioning carries on a theme of a few of my blogs this year: Deep Reading. I am concerned that a lot of teaching reading dwells simply on skimming and scanning. Find and locate isn’t that high on the reading skills necessary for life. It is helpful, but it will not solve a case. It will not make you great in business. It is a building block. There is so much more to reading. In the past, the DfE has suggested that good readers paint pictures in their head when they read. Or, they might ask a question. Or they may even predict how things might end. I have always struggled with this notion of developing reading in lessons. Simply getting a student to draw a picture of a bit they have read does not, for me, show a high level of understanding or engagement with a text. It simply shows that they can decode a text. Yes, some things might be inferences, but does it really develop a student to be a better reader?

Teaching Year 12 and 13s English Literature has not involved me getting them to draw bits from ‘King Lear’ or Edward Bond’s ‘Saved’. No, it has involved things other than drawing. I have recently read some books on developing literacy in schools and they constantly refer to drawing (visualising), predicting, questioning and other methods to develop reading. Now, for less able students these are good strategies to use to develop their reading skills, but what about the more able students? Or, the average students? What do we do about developing their reading skills? Reading more and harder texts doesn’t always, in my opinion, develop the reader. The old days of ‘just get on with it’ isn’t something I am happy with. I like students to have independence and I do want them to have an idea of how they can become fluent readers, but as we are talking about reading it is very vague. As reading is an internalised process, we need to be explicit with reading and the processes relating to reading. And, I think questions are a huge part of this.

When?

There are a few problems with my questioning in lessons. These are some of the problems:

•       Tend to be loaded towards the end of the process

•       Focused on clarifying understanding and not developing understanding / thoughts or feelings

•       Specific

•       Clear direction (teacher-led)

•       Limited in number so I can be precise

•       Limiting the thought processes (recall not apply)

•       Focused on students answering, rather than both answering and questioning

 

 

I think that I often leave the questioning at the end of the process, because I want to see what they have learnt and not how they are learning. The position of the question can help us understand how they are learning. At the start of the process, it shows us how much prior knowledge they have, or what their intuition is like. In the middle of the learning process, it shows us where on the spectrum of understanding they are. At the end of the process, it shows us what they have and haven’t got. That for me is where I think I need to develop my questioning. Where in the process should I ask a question so that I can develop the skills of a student? In other words: Death to Comprehension Tasks! Or, less of them. Or, just do one at the start and in the middle, as well as at the end.

One thing I have started doing is getting students to ask the questions themselves at the start of a text. Recently, I was teaching ‘Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ and I showed the class a film poster. The class had to think of questions. . Rather than get them to think of questions about the plot, I got them to think about the theme or the structure or even the message of the text from the cover of the film. That focused way of questioning helped me get some high level questions before they had even read the text.

What?

Then, what questions should I ask? Well, I have been on so many CPD sessions and I have heard this too many times: closed questions are bad and open questions are good. Yes, let’s reduce the complexity of questioning to two types of questions. Yes let’s reduce the beauty of the English language to two categories. Questions are complex and we need to understand that. Here are some examples of different types of questions. You could categorise them into closed and open questions but I think you’d be a bit sad, as these questions do a lot more than give you a long or short answer.

•       Why not…. ? Why doesn’t….? Why wouldn’t..?

                Questioning the alternatives

•       Which is the best /least /most/ weakest….?

                Questioning that aids evaluation

•       Did you not think that …..?

                Questioning that asks them to adopt a viewpoint

•       If_________________, then why ________?

                Questioning the consequences

I wanted to help staff in my school to develop the reading skills of students, but also I wanted to develop questioning at the same time. Step forward ‘The Detectives’. Detectives are clever people and they read situations and people. It is my approach to developing reading through questions and using precise skills based questions. Each detective represents a different type of skills which has a set of questions to develop that skill.

Here’s an example using an extract from the Daily Mail website:

Sherlock Holmes: What can you infer about the writer’s opinion here?

Mother caught drinking LAGER at the school gates as she waits to pick up her children

By Steve Nolan

Perched on railing with a can of lager in one hand and a cigarette in the other, this mother is hardly setting a shining example to children filing out of a nearby primary school.

 
Here's what the detectives look like. I have includes some example questions and some sentence stems for answering.

Sherlock Holmes                                                                       Inferences / reading between the lines

What clues are there that ….?

How do ____ and ____ link together?

What is the connection between _____ and ______?

I can infer from this that …

This suggests that…

It seems that …
This evidence and that evidence show that …

Miss Marple                                                        relating to our own world/ experience/ knowledge

Where have you seen this before?

What other subject has this?
What skills in RE can you bring in to explain this?

 

This reminds me of …

We saw this when …
I notice that _____ has happened when ______

 

Poirot                                                                                          looking for the flaws, inconsistencies

Which bits don’t add up?

Where have they contradicted themselves?
What are the weaknesses in their argument?
 

They say this, but this bit doesn’t match up with that. 

I notice that they say this but later they say the opposite.
I don’t think they are completely certain because of ….

 

 Inspector Morse                                                                                        looking at the perspectives

What does the other person say?

How does this person’s view differ from the rest of the people?
Does everybody agree with this point?

 

One person said ____________ while the others said this …

From a different perspective, it can be seen that …
 

 

Inspector Clouseau                                            making a hypothesis and getting it wrong or right

What do you think will happened?

Why did they do that?
What will happen as a result of this?
 

I think that ___ will happen.

I predict that ______

 

Now, this is in its infancy and I am sure it will change and develop, but at the moment it is a framework for asking questions. It is also a framework that focuses on developing a skill rather than just test what the student knows. This is the beauty of questioning. The right question at the right time can teach a child something or develop a skill. Hopefully, people will be able to find a use for these somewhere. Some have used it to get the class in groups. A group of Miss Marples. Or, a group of Sherlock Holmes. Much better than a group that focus on closed questions.

If you can think of some other detectives with a different skills focus, I would love to hear from you.

I will carry the question blog on next week.

 

Thanks for reading,

Xris32

 

P.S. Thanks to @englishlulu for the photos. Thanks also to @HFletcherWood for his technical support. Last thanks to David and Jenny for organising the whole event.  

Virtual Reality Shakespeare

Over the years I have taught Shakespeare’s context good, bad and ugly. I have taught it as a lecture or I have made students do an infamous fact search of things to do with his life, theatre and world. Whatever I did, I ended up with some meaningless waffle copied out from a website. Make a factsheet. Dull results. Make a poster. Boring.  Make a quiz based on the facts. Zzzzzz. Some people might read this and think, ‘Well, I do that, and they loved it’. Maybe I don’t have the magic ingredient, but writing about context always seems to involve some kind of ‘question and answer’ task or some form of regurgitating facts found in a book.

Last year, I did something different with a group of Year 7s with Shakespeare. I got the students to write about the experience of going to the theatre as if they were there. None of the boring and mindlessly irrelevant stuff about Shakespeare dying on his birthday. After several years of students telling me this, my response of ‘really’ is wearing thin. So, I got students to write about watching a play. Subsequently, in my trawling through the internet over the holidays I found that I am not alone in this idea. Great minds think alike.  However, the resource on TES was focusing on descriptive writing, whereas I was focusing on contextual knowledge. (Sorry, but can't find it. When I do, I will put a link here.)

Understanding is more important than lots of mindless facts. The facts are important to understanding, but often the overreliance of factual information leads to some codswallop statements when students write. The facts are used to form ideas rather than applied to an idea. Shakespeare left his wife to work in London is used by a student to crowbar the idea that Shakespeare didn’t like women so makes Lady Macbeth a horrible character. Or, some students just throw contextual facts in like salt and pepper; they just end a sentence with, ‘this is because fathers decided who daughters could marry.’ I feel that something more has to be done with this factual knowledge to develop a real understanding of a situation.

Often, the context becomes a list of facts that we feel we need to impart to students before they fully understand something. But, I feel that the facts need more exploration and connection to other factors of the time. The whole chuck a load of things at them and, hopefully, something will stick doesn’t work for me.  Take, for example, this simple fact:

Elizabethans commonly thought that the Devil was capable of taking over your body and any suggestion of devilish behaviour or costume (actors) caused fear in an audience.

In a nutshell, they were scared of the Devil. Some deeper thinking is need for students to understand the implications of that fact.

If they were scared of the Devil, what else were they scared of?

If they believed the Devil was real, then how religious were they?

If they were scared of actors being devilish, how did they react on stage?

If they thought the Devil could take over a body, how did they view their friends and family differently?

If they believed in the Devil, did they think all crimes had something to do with this?

A simple fact alone becomes something more. The exploration of that one contextual fact has lots of resonance in so many different ways.  The questioning of the fact gives us a deeper understanding so that when we apply the questions to a play such as Macbeth, we understand the context better. You understand the world was one of fear. Look at the play and you see a fear of the supernatural, the fear of family and friends, the fear of things not being right.  Then, add another fact such as James I’s interest in witchcraft and you understand the first fact better. If the King is interested, then the rest of the country would be interested by default.  I am teaching ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ to Year 10s and the one fact that I have unpicked is the fear that the white community held at the time: they feared, incorrectly, of black men being unable to control themselves and attacking their women. The questions this leads to are far more effective than a small photocopy of history of racism in America.  

Rather than listing lots of contextual facts, we should be unpicking them bit by bit and developing our understanding further. Then, we can relate them to other aspects or facts. Knowing one fact and its significance is much better than knowing lots of facts and not knowing their significance. But, maybe we need to give more time to unwinding the facts. I am guilty of rushing through things, as I plough through so many aspects in a text; but, maybe, I need to be a little more simple with how I approach context.

Anyway, how did I do the virtual reality Shakespeare? First of all, I had to explain what virtual reality is, as unlike me they weren’t around in the 1990s.

1] First, I started with the facts. Well, true or false statements. Students decided what was true and what was false in the following below. They are silly, but they help to give a sense of the time.  Each statement could become a stimulus for exploring the context further. If they didn’t wee in a bag, where did they wee then?

When going to the theatre, people used to carry a little bag to wee in.

When you sneeze, somebody else must say 'bless you' or the Devil will take over your body.
If you wear pretend horns on your head and said you were the Devil on stage, then people would think you were the Devil.
People used to carry a little bag of flowers to keep away diseases.
The actors used real explosives and fire on a wooden stage.
Women couldn't act on stage.
People couldn't watch the plays at night time.
You were not allowed to throw rotten fruit at the actors.
Actors were only given their lines the day before the performance.

2] Then students compared two pictures. One of a modern theatre and one of the Globe theatre. This provided a point of comparison for discussion. The longer I teach, the more I realise that we need to place more things side by side to draw knowledge from students.

3] At this stage I worked with students on the language of Shakespeare’s plays and we worked through a small scene from ‘Hamlet’. Year 7s seem to love the opening scene to ‘Hamlet’ for some strange reason.

4] By this point, I felt it was necessary to revisit the context, so we watched five minutes of ‘Shakespeare in Love’. Obviously, I made sure it was a suitable bit; and the bit I selected was the bit towards the end, where they perform ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Students jotted down what they would see, hear, feel, smell and taste, based on the clip.

 

5] Now the tricky bit! I had to explain what virtual reality is to students who had never heard of the concept. It surprises me, but they haven’t. In the 1990s, it was all the rage, but now it isn’t.

I then got a student to be blindfolded. He then walked (sorry, nervously stumbled) through the class and if he bumped into a student or went near someone, they had to shout out something they might expect to see.  Now, I would hesitate to do this with an older group as you might get a few interesting answers, but, thankfully, the Year 7s were kind. The student bumped into a hawker, a baker on his day off, a boy that wanted to be an actor, and someone urinating on the floor.

We have so many visual stimuli for Shakespeare’s theatre that I think we need to employ our imaginations a bit more. This did.

6] After all that, I decided to narrow the focus on an object that might be seen in that experience. A handkerchief. A purse. A pie. A dagger.  We then had a go at describing that object and experimenting with word choices and how to fit the object into a sentence.

 Finally, they turn this all into a piece of prose.

Task: Write two sides of A4 paper describing the experience of watching one of Shakespeare’s plays.  Your object must fit into the description somehow.

The final products were the most interesting things I have read about context in years. The writing was engaging and fun, but they proved how much students knew about the theatre of the time. These are some of the scenarios that students described:

·         A teenage boy worried about going on stage.

·         A noble worried that they would be robbed.

·         A thief picking pockets.

·         A man in the audience scared at the sight of the ghost.

·         A woman in the audience worried about the weather.

·         An assassin looking for a target.

All of these descriptions were to the backdrop of ‘Hamlet’, so there were constant references to what was happening on stage mixed in with the perspective chosen. In fact, the students were weaving in the context with the play. A few years later and I will be asking them at GCSE to do this and think about how the audience would react to a scene. Here Year 7s were doing it unprompted and with glee.  Some of the more able students were writing using Elizabethan language and others just lifted lines from the play.

When marking these I could see that students had knowledge of the context, but also they had understanding. And, I think, understanding the context is far more important than the knowledge of it. I still need to work on things. But, from now on a few facts, for me, well understood are better than a paragraph of details that isn’t understood and isn’t related to the text.

Thanks for reading,

Xris

P.S. Please read my other blog about context for more ideas about teaching context here.