The Digital Education Initiative
What this is about
In this current age of tight budgets and limited funding, theatre field trips—sometimes a student’s first or only introduction to theatre—have been reduced, or in some cases cut altogether. To that end, The Curtain has developed, in collaboration with a team of Shakespeare scholars and education professionals, a series of study guides to accompany our radio theatre dramas.
These dynamic, multi-media guides, filled with activities, videos, lesson plans, actor interviews, and more, are designed to be used in a classroom or virtual setting. They are provided free of charge to qualifying schools, teachers, and educational institutions.
Why study Shakespeare?
Photo by Alan Warren
Teachers are sometimes asked: “Why devote so much time and resources to works written so long ago—and so removed from our everyday understanding?” To this, we prefer to quote James Baldwin, (novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist), who left the United States for France in 1948 to escape racism in America. In Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare, he says:
“Every writer in the English language, I should imagine, has at some point hated Shakespeare, has turned away from that monstrous achievement with a kind of sick envy … I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression … But I feared him, too, feared him because, in his hands, the English language became the mightiest of instruments. No one would ever write that way again. No one would ever be able to match, much less surpass, him.”
Over time, Baldwin came to understand that “the language of Shakespeare revealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past.” And that Shakespeare, the “greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people … by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.”
How It Works
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Contact us using the button below or by emailing education@thecurtain.org to express your interest and ask any questions about our study guides.
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Someone from our team will be in touch to answer any questions and provide a short questionnaire about your school or institution for our funders. Once completed you’re all set!
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Once we receive the form back from you we will send a link and password to access all of the study guide materials for the play (or plays) you’ve selected which can be used both in a virtual or classroom setting.
“Not your average study guide! The thought and care put into the lesson plans and supporting materials was evident from the beginning. My students were engaged and challenged.”
— NY Middle School TeacherWhat People Are Saying
“My students loved listening to Julius Caesar. With so much endless screen-time these days it was refreshing to see them so excited and passionate about listening to Shakespeare.”
— NJ High School Teacher“The students I work with all have varying degrees of vision-impairment and some have mobility issues. Your radio play brought the theater to them. The performances, the Broadway stars, they loved it and so did I. Thank you!
— NY Middle School Teacher