From Shakespeare to Science: The East Fund in Action

by Henri Rix Wood

Reprinted from Lancer News, May 2006

On an April morning, sophomores in Kelly Fast’s English class are collaborating with professional actors as the students prepare to perform their own adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello.

A few days earlier, Miles Martin’s physics pupils experimented with state-of-the-art ray optics kits to learn about light reflection.

What do Othello and optics have in common?

Both projects are financed by the Shawnee Mission East Educational Excellence Fund, which supports classroom programs, technology and professional development for staff. The fund has awarded more than $105,000 for 14 grants in the last eighteen months.

One of those grants provides three years of funding for “Shakespeare in the Classroom.” This year, the program brought four actors from the Kansas City Repertory Theatre to work with 100 students in sophomore honors English classes taught by Fast and Michael Pulsinelli. Next year, all sophomore English classes will participate in the program.

In December, students and the actors analyzed Julius Caesar. Then each class staged an abridged version of the drama that was written by the actors. For the two-week Othello project, each class is creating its own adaptation. Student groups are assigned one of the five acts of the play to edit.

On the second day of the two-week project that began in mid-April, representatives from each group “pitched” their class’ version of Othello to the actors, who will select the adaptation that will be performed by all four classes. In Fast’s fourth-hour class, student Meredith Walrafen introduced the presentation by singing a synopsis of the play. Then class representatives explained to the panel of actors how they trimmed the play from 3,600 to 800 lines and concluded with a parody of Othello. Following the presentation, the actors questioned the students about their choices in an exchange that resembled a courtroom drama.

As the next step, students will audition for roles. Then the actors will help students learn their parts and rehearse scenes.

By show time, these students really know their Shakespeare, according to Fast and Pulsinelli. To cut the script, students explore the play’s main ideas and decide which ones to emphasize. Speaking lines aloud and acting out scenes helps students understand what four-hundred-year-old texts mean. The actors offer students an alternate perspective on Shakespeare, who wrote to be performed, not read, that enhances the more scholarly approach of their teachers.

While the play’s the thing,the project also offers students practice in collaboration, leadership and risk taking.

“The hardest parts of this project have been cutting the act and not smiling while I was playing Othello,” says student Jack Peterson, who portrayed the character in the parody. “The most fun parts have been interacting with people in class and the actors.”

Like his English Department colleagues, Martin also advocates active learning, which is elemental to the PASCO systems for physics and physical science classes. The East Fund grant enabled him to set up six stations in his room where students can use computers and special software to conduct experiments. The “Hands On, Minds On Science” program also provides equipment such as ray optic sets that allow small groups of students to test relationships between matter and energy—the basic stuff of physics. Students particularly like the “collision carts,” small metal contraptions that run on a ruled track past photo gates, which allow students to measure velocity while crashing things with the teacher’s approval.

This year, about 150 students are using the new program. Martin estimates 500 students will have access to this technology next year as other teachers learn to use the system.

“Instead of me talking about things, kids are building a basis of knowledge by doing,” Martin says. “ PASCO spurs more questions. It mimics the scientific process.”