Education

Richmond Shakespeare Educational Outreach

Richmond Shakespeare Educational Outreach is dedicated to bringing Shakespeare’s words to life for teachers, students, and learners of all ages throughout the Richmond metropolitan area and beyond. Richmond Shakespeare believes that it is not enough simply to read Shakespeare--we feel that the spirit of play in which Shakespeare's works were originally meant to be performed is necessary for understanding the meaning of his works and for understanding how his works teach us something about what it means to be human.

Why do we feel this way? A recent study conducted by the Arts Education Partnership and the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humantie called Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning  indicates that an exposure to the arts can help students have more meaningful learning experiences. The arts nurture the development of cognitive, social, and personal competencies in ways that are fun and engaging for students, and the dramatic arts, in particular, force students to be active rather than passive learners.

Shakespeare's Hamlet reflects an understanding of this relationship between acting and learning when he tells the players who have arrived at Elsinore that:

When we go beyond reading, and actually act out Shakespeare's language, we are not only better able to understand his plays--we are better able to understand ourselves and the world we live in.

More than 400 years after Shakespeare's lifetime, many people still think of Shakespeare as the stuffy old author of a stuffy old book--and a long and torturous one at that! Our goal is to show how Shakespeare’s works are not simply words on a page, but living and breathing representations of fundamental human motives and thoughts that we all grapple with throughout our lives.

Our workshops and residencies strive to impart an enthusiasm about Shakespeare in an immediate, on-your-feet way. Classes are kept small so that all students are participants. Activities are deceptively fun, and in the end, teachers and students alike are consistently amazed at how much they have learned.