Trippingly on the Tongue: Playing with Ideas – English, Year 9

Overview

These two year 9 projects involved pupils selecting key scenes from a Shakespeare play and using video to consider and then perform different interpretations of that scene. The English class looking at Twelfth Night videoed three different interpretations of the same scene and then used them to create an interactive web page giving the user choice of which version they wanted to view. The Drama class studying Macbeth looked at character motivation and used video to explore the different motivations that characters might have. They too published these videos on to a web page.

Learning Objectives

· To use video authoring to explore different interpretations of key scenes from a Shakespeare play
· To explore how video can be used to convey different meanings to any audience
· To explore the text as performance
· To use editing tools to develop their critical and analytical skills

Project description

Trippingly on the Tongue was a project with two different Year 9 classes in different schools studying Shakespeare plays. An English class studying Twelfth Night for their KS3 SATS and a Drama class studying Macbeth. In each class they were asked to select key scenes from each play. Working in groups, they considered one of these scenes – thinking about what happened in that scene and how it related to the rest of the play. They then had to think about how the text could be interpreted through performance in different ways. They were asked to do this by considering character intention; what characters might be thinking at the beginning of the scene, and letting the other characters respond. For example, Olivia feeling anxious about meeting Sebastian, or feeling excited, or in love. The groups filmed their three interpretations of extracts of the scene – also considering how to perform for a video camera and how the use of video techniques might add layers of interpretation and meaning (e.g. through using close-up to emphasise a point).

Pupils brought in costumes and props and filmed the first version of their scene in the school playground on a sunny day. At Highwire they filmed further versions and edited them using iMovie. Each group created two webpages.

Instead of filming three different versions of the same scene some groups chose to make one video of the scene itself, but adding extra video pieces of the characters speaking their thoughts before and after the scene directly to camera. The videos were then put into a web-page offering the audience different choices of how they wanted to view the scene. Each of the scenes were then linked together with supporting text explaining what had happened in the play in the intervening scenes, therefore producing an online version of the play using performance as well as just text.

Creative thinking and behaviour: Playing with Ideas

The project almost literally involved pupils playing with ideas in that they were acting out different ideas that the text could possibly contain – about characters, about motivation and about theme. The project focused on the two plays as performances rather than as written texts and through performance the pupils had to read closely and interpret the text. Video allowed pupils to play with the text and to consider how it could be performed and then presented to get across different aspects of character motivation. Pupils had to consider the context of the speech, the feelings of the character, the meaning of the speech and an analysis of what in the text supports that motivation. The pupils were using ICT to get inside of the text and to play with it.

Key features of ICT that enabled and supported pupils’ creativity

Interactivity: Through performing, filming and editing scenes from the play collaboratively the pupils were interacting with the text, with each other and with the technology. Although they could have performed the play without the technology, the technology added another level of interactivity. The final web pages also involved pupils thinking about audience and how the audience for their work would interact with their pages – through the choices they would make about which version of the scene to select.

Multimodality: The final web pages used different media to convey particular pieces of information. The videos gave a performance of the text but words were used to provide additional information to the audience about what had been going on in the play.

The web pages also used scanned collages and images that pupils produced that they used as backgrounds and conveyed atmosphere and contributed to the overall quality of the work.