Decolonising the English GCSE Curriculum: Workshops for Teachers

How do you bring diverse voices into the GCSE English classroom? How can you work within the requirements of the National Curriculum to decolonise your teaching?

Roehampton’s English and Creative Writing academics have devised a series of 60-minute professional development workshops for teachers of KS3 and KS4 English to take place virtually in February 2020.

Sessions focus on particular set texts as examples, but provide material suitable for teaching a range of GCSE set texts, so there is something for everyone in each session.

This session's topic will be on Shakespeare: Othello and Macbeth.

Shakespeare’s plays are strikingly modern in their depiction of rich and complex black characters, how they explore contemporary issues around language, race, culture, assimilation, the social construction of identity, and how they have been re-imagined through diverse casting in performance.

This session will consider how the meaning of the term ‘tragedy’ is tied to racial prejudice in Othello, looking at historical attitudes to race from the Elizabethans to the present, and in key performances of Othello by black actors. The session will also look at a famous all-black production of Macbeth by the legendary film director Orson Welles, and think about what it means for Shakespeare to be performed by a diverse cast of non-professional actors. The session will include classroom exercises including ‘hotseating’, where a student pretends to be a character and is interviewed by other students, and simple stagings, readings and performances of key scenes to bring out the themes in the discussion.

Explore our other Decolonising the English GCSE Curriculum events here: https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/humanities/schools-outreach/