Blog Post #3 Anna's Arts for Kids

I am doing service learning at Anna’s Arts for kids for both Early Shakespeare and another class. The other class is Race and Class in Schools, so when I speak with people at St. Anna’s or am asked about what classes I’m there for, people immediately understand how my Race and Class in Schools directly connects to the service I’m doing. However, it seems to be unclear or abstract to others that I’d be there for Early Shakespeare. 

One way that I explain the relevance between Service Learning and  Shakespeare is that Shakespeare’s works seem unaccessible to many people. Reading certain books, completing homework assignments, and being successful in school could seem to be unaccessible and more difficult to some students I work with who don’t have the privileges that make it easy to do so. Part of what I’m doing at Anna’s Arts is reading with students and helping them to feel more confident while reading. One of my goals in Service Learning has been to get to know the children in a way that allows me to understand what makes them thrive and what makes them feel discouraged or get easily frustrated. Helping students build confidence and try to help them in a way that they will be excited to read in the future on their own, like reading Shakespeare and becoming comfortable with reading his works on my own, takes time and patience. The overarching relevance that currently stands out to me between Shakespeare and Service Learning is assessing what makes something come across as unaccessible, and parceling out how can barriers and associations be broken down in different ways to make the unaccessible accessible to all. 

During our Cluster Convo yesterday, someone noted that students writing the Critical Concepts blog are engaging in work that involves being in their own heads and spending solitary time with the text whereas Service Learners are out being engaged in a community. One of the reasons why I have enjoyed Service Learning so much is because it has given me the opportunity to get out of a purely academic setting; when I show up at St.Anna’s I find that I’m simply there and present with the kids and in the activities and not thinking much about Shakespeare. However, the Cluster Convos have been really eye-opening and beneficial because, by hearing from the Critical Concept bloggers and going through the prep sheets, I have been able to take what I’m doing at Service Learning and actually process it. The Cluster Convo work in the classroom has helped me to get out of that mode of disconnect with Shakespeare that I find myself in during Service Learning.

As we saw in the New York Times article about the performance of King Lear in a Syrian refugee camp, Shakespeare remains relevant in “the real world” sometimes in unexpected ways depending on how it’s presented. The performance of this play seemed to provide entertainment, joy, and education for the refugees. It also seemed to instill a sense of pride and confidence (for example, in the article, one of the mothers seemed proud to announce to another person that her son played King Lear.) With the topics of many of the Critical Concept blogs (Rank & Status, Memory, Sexuality, Fate, etc) we see that material, topics, ideas, etc. that come up in Shakespeare are not just stuck in a time warp– they remain relevant and present in our lives today. Shakespeare will also always hold a specific place in “education,” whether his works are presented to people and students in an accessible way or not. Education has various levels of accessibility, and the the way Shakespeare is perceived in various different ways, as culturally elite or something for the masses, makes Shakespeare very present today in “the real world.”