Local/Global Shakespeares

Assessment

Exploring Shakespeare – his life, his works, his role in the region and across the globe – should be an exciting and inspiring experience. Assessment on this module is therefore designed to capture your excitement and to inspire you to the creation of something completely new.

In your Individual Reflective Narrative (50%) you will focus on the two or three moments in the module that had the deepest effect on your understanding. These might be moments when, through lateral and imaginative thinking, you’ve made connections between apparently unrelated ideas or disciplines, or between Shakespeare’s time and our own, or between the local and the global. These moments might also be inspired by some of our guest speakers and experts, or by field trips to Stratford-upon-Avon. The Narrative is both personal and intellectual, an analytic account of a mind –your mind – being opened, tested and changed.

Shakespeare took old stories and made them new. The Student Devised Assessment (SDA) (50%) allows you to do the same. It is exactly as open and flexible as it sounds. (General information about SDAs can be found here.) Together with your tutor, you choose some aspect of the module’s content and explore it in whatever medium you wish. Possible examples for this module: an adaptation of a Shakespeare work into a contemporary setting; a market research project on global tourism in Stratford-upon-Avon; an art project capturing neuroscientific findings about the effect of complex language on the brain; a podcast on the cultural reputation of Shakespeare in relation to your own region, background or heritage. Whatever you submit, you will have engaged with a range of theories and approaches, and these will be documented in a short accompanying written commentary.