WHAT IS ADAPTING HAMLET?
ADAPTING HAMLET is an end-of-unit collaborative project completed by all five sections of the two 11th- and 12th-grade English classes I taught during the fall semester of the 2015-2016 school year.
For this year's two sections of AP Literature & Composition (1st period and 3rd period), focused thematically on adaptation and appropriation, this project marked the end of our attention to Shakespeare's text on its own before broadening our perspective to include textual and filmic adaptations of it. After this project, we read and watched Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Salman Rushdie's "Yorick." In the semester-long British Literature class (2nd, 5th, and 6th periods), this adaptation project was the culmination of our focus on the power and responsibilities of bards in their societies.
For this year's two sections of AP Literature & Composition (1st period and 3rd period), focused thematically on adaptation and appropriation, this project marked the end of our attention to Shakespeare's text on its own before broadening our perspective to include textual and filmic adaptations of it. After this project, we read and watched Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Salman Rushdie's "Yorick." In the semester-long British Literature class (2nd, 5th, and 6th periods), this adaptation project was the culmination of our focus on the power and responsibilities of bards in their societies.
OBJECTIVES
This project provided opportunities for students to develop
- analytically: in completing this project, students should establish a deeper, more deliberate level of interaction with and understanding of the source text;
- rhetorically: the project requires students to compose with a more nuanced awareness of audience and deploy the rhetorical moves sophisticated communicators use to interact with their audiences;
- multimodally: this project invites students to practice their skills in multimodal communication, whether linguistically, visually, orally/aurally, gesturally, or digitally, including creating and publishing digital artifacts;
- individually: because the work and objectives of the project were established by student-driven decision-making, individual students students will likely demonstrate greater investment in the work and their work product and a greater sense of expertise and empowerment; and
- communally: to successfully complete this project, students must work together to determine their goals and how they might achieve them, resulting in a more self-consciously team-oriented learning environment and increased mutual respect for and interdependence upon one another.
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