As part of the 2017 Shakespeare Festival, USQ Artsworx is offering high school teachers the opportunity to participate in a workshop designed to give you the skills to make Shakespeare more accessible to your students. 

Thinking about Agency with Macbeth: a workshop for high school teachers

(Workshop leaders: Associate Professor Laurie Johnson and Dr Darryl Chalk)

Help your students find a way into one of Shakespeare’s most popular but harrowing plays. This four hour workshop (2 x 2 hour sessions, with additional afternoon tea break) will provide teachers with teaching strategies and resources to use in the classroom, enabling students to find their own way into the play by supporting an “I think” approach to text and performance. The workshop will show you how to help students get past the clichés by focusing on the way the play engages with issues of agency both historically and today. What makes people do the things they do? Can people change their destiny? Thinking about Agency with Macbeth will further enhance ideas around experimenting with literacy through reading, viewing, listening and creating text for students, with particular emphasis on how stage questions inform a rich understanding of the text.  Ideal for teachers of English, English Communication, and English Extension, as well as Drama and Media studies, participants in the workshop will receive Australian Professional Standards certification, along with a range of resources that can be adapted for local implementation in the classroom.