The University and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) recently announced an innovative new partnership to help transform the classroom experience of Shakespeare for young people. The joint venture, Teaching Shakespeare, will deliver high-quality online professional development for teachers through a specially created set of online resources, including unique access to a rehearsal room.

The initiative has been led from the University by Warwick Business School, in collaboration with the Institute of Education and the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. The partnership will provide up to a thousand teachers a year around the world with access to the RSC's resources and creative talent using an online platform developed by WBS, drawing on their long experience of providing distance learning programmes. Up to 400 of those teachers will also have the opportunity to work with an academic tutor to gain their own postgraduate qualifications in the teaching of Shakespeare, accredited by Warwick.

Online resources and qualification route

The online learning platform provides two pathways for teachers. Firstly, they can access the films and accompanying materials, including the RSC Shakespeare Toolkit for Teachers, as a stand-alone set of resources. Secondly, the learning platform offers a qualification route for teachers combining academic study, practical classroom tasks, assessed teaching assignments and connections to a community of tutors and fellow students. This course includes formal assessment of work and leads to a Post Graduate Award in the Teaching of Shakespeare. The graduate-level programme offers a route to achieve an MA in the Advanced Teaching of Shakespeare.

Education specialists, Rachel Gartside from the RSC, Warwick's Professor Jonothan Neelands and world-renowned Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro are filmed working with students in UK and US classrooms, introducing them to one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, Romeo and Juliet.

Teaching Shakespeare also features exclusive podcasts and interviews with internationally renowned artists and directors as well as a range of specialist academics and teachers. For example, the RSC's legendary Voice Director Cicely Berry, actors David Oyelowo (Henry VI for the RSC and most recently in Planet of the Apes) and John Lithgow (RSC Malvolio in Twelfth Night and Showtime's Dexter), directors Rupert Goold, Roxana Silbert, Peter Brook and Michael Boyd all provide insights into their working practices and show how Shakespeare is a writer uniquely placed to speak to the cares and concerns of young people today.

Professor Mark Taylor, Dean of Warwick Business School, commented:

This partnership brings together two leading organisations located in Shakespeare's Warwickshire to help teachers around the globe provide young people with richly resourced and inspirational lessons on Shakespeare in performance. Warwick Business School's business acumen and experience at delivering high quality online materials and distance learning to tens of thousands people world-wide will be used to open the RSC's decades of content and practical experience of the performance of Shakespeare to support the teaching of Shakespeare in schools.

Jacqui O'Hanlon, Director of Education at the Royal Shakespeare Company, said:

50% of schoolchildren in the world study Shakespeare and that extraordinary fact has led us to develop Teaching Shakespeare, a new education partnership between the RSC and the University of Warwick that uses the latest technologies to connect us with teachers nationally and internationally. We believe that young people get the most out of Shakespeare's plays when they approach them in the way that RSC actors do: on their feet, actively exploring the text and unlocking its meaning. Teaching Shakespeare brings together an astonishing range of voices, experiences and insights from the worlds of professional theatre and education that explore the impact of these kinds of approaches on actors and students alike. This rich array of materials will now be available to teachers anywhere in the world, thanks to the online platform and expertise provided by Warwick Business School.

Find out more...

Visit the Teaching Shakespeare site, which launched on Tuesday 7 February 2012.

Teachers can register from April 2012 and the first set of courses and resources will be available in October 2012.