Blog Post 3- Katherine Seitel

Throughout my time at Uptown Shepherd’s Center I’ve talked to the members about my Shakespeare class; why a Shakespeare class would place me at USC, why I don’t have a theater background, and variations on those two questions. When I first started attending the theater class I shrugged at these questions, I wasn’t sure why I was in a theater class since I don’t have a theater background, a skill highly coveted in the class as only one woman who commutes from Alabama to attend USC and her community orchestra rehearsal every Monday. It was hard to say that I was in a theater class because I am graduating and the Shakespeare class was the only one that satisfied a requirement or that the theater class fit into my schedule. Instead I said things that varied from ‘I did a theater camp in middle school, but I’m really not into performing…’ to ‘I’m excited to learn!’ to ‘why not?!’  The responses to my responses vary because the levels of lucidity and memory vary so greatly among the members of USC. There have not been specific times at USC that I think that my experience is similar or connected to Shakespeare, but in thinking about my time there in retrospect I can see that the way Shakespeare does in fact connect on basic levels to the work that I do at USC. These levels include the human experience of feeling dislocated from a community as an outsider. This theme is explored in many of the plays we read, most memorably for me in The Merchant of Venice and The Comedy of Errors. The feeling of dislocation I felt as an outsider and not understanding the rules of USC reminded me of the dislocation felt by characters in Shakespeare’s plays. The notion of place and outsider/insider status in Shakespeare’s plays helped me to situate this experience in my own life in the context of Shakespeare’s time period. In examining my experience of feeling like an outsider to this feeling described by Shakespeare made my experience at USC seem to align more with a class on Shakespeare. I think that Shakespeare does have a place in the world of service learning and community service in general, but I have had real difficulty parsing exactly what this place should be. In thinking about Shakespeare’s place in these environments I also thought a lot about accessibility and education. In the classroom at Loyola there is a level of discourse in regarding Shakespeare that I at times struggle to follow and when I listen to members of USC struggle to read, I have trouble viewing Shakespeare as accessible and applicable to society today. Shakespeare was for the masses in his time, but before this class I had not read Shakespeare since my freshman year of high school. Whether this was a failure on the part of my education is debatable, but it leads me to question Shakespeare place in our modern society. Overall, I have mixed feelings about Shakespeare in the context of USC and the service learning in general, I have had an amazing time working with the people at USC and feel really grateful that I have had the opportunity to get to know such lively and welcoming people. The fact that a Shakespeare class has the option for service learning is great and I definitely think it has helped me to examine privilege and to value my education. The fact that I get to read Shakespeare is a privilege and in meeting and interacting with people unlike myself, I can see the ways in which examining service learning through the lens of Shakespeare helps to appreciate my education.