Found in translation: How teaching an online course taught me we are all Shakespeare Language Learners
“Unless you’re in Taiwan,” I wrote in my introduction to my classes, “we won’t meet in person this semester.” I posted a picture from a trip my family and I took down the east coast of the island; behind me, steep mountainsides plunged into the Pacific Ocean. “This is my back yard,” I wrote. “Just kidding.”
I knew I was risking a bad first impression as a tourist in a t-shirt, but I didn’t know how to present myself to my students that first semester, fall of 2012. I could hardly believe what I was doing in the first place. As an educator, I want to have a “connection” with my students—I want to get to know them, listen to them, learn from them—but now I was as distant as I could possibly be, online and on the other side of the globe. When I look at this picture now, however, I see myself as yet unaware of how this unusual circumstance would change my perspective on what “connectedness” means, both as it regards my students, and as it regards the teaching and learning of my subject, Shakespeare.
What brought my family and me to Taiwan is that my wife, a Ph.D. student, received a grant to study Chinese. We have two children, a daughter who was then 15 months and a son who was then four, so this was the last year we could re-locate without the added question of where he would go to school. I don’t have any on-campus obligations as an adjunct faculty member, so my boss allowed me to spend a year teaching online.
When you think of global, online education, the first thing that may jump to mind is the term MOOC, the “massive open online classes” that are widely publicized—and criticized. My classes were not these, but rather, closer to what are now being called SPOCs—small private online classes. Enrollment is limited to the same number I’d have in the classroom, thanks to the efforts made by the college’s collective bargaining unit. This allows me to have frequent, personalized correspondence with my students—once or twice a week, at least.
(Next page: As international as the students)
In classes such as mine, the “massive” element is not the students, but the subject matter: the power and possibilities found in Shakespeare’s plays. The students, then, can be the tight and narrow focus of the teacher’s attention.
But what is exactly “in focus” in an online class when the student is never seen? I found the answer in the work that online learning organically fosters.
As international as my students
After a few jet-lagged weeks in the tropical heat of Taiwan’s late summer, the semester started. In the early morning I’d ride my rusty-trusty bike alongside the enormous Da An Gongyuan (“park of great peace”) to the public library, an eight-floor concrete tower filled with fake tropical plants and, on its upper floors, rows of four-person tables which, on the weekends, are filled by improbably quiet high school students poring over their textbooks. I’d find a seat, and once more into the breach, dear friends: another day of work. Logging on to Blackboard, I would check to see how my Shakespeare students in Michigan were doing.
Except they weren’t all in Michigan. On the second day of class, a student wrote that he was in the Philippines, about an hour’s flight away from me. Another student was in Germany. Others were spread out all over Michigan and the United States. And ironically, one of my students was from Taipei but currently living in Ann Arbor, where I was on faculty at Washtenaw Community College.
This was my first eye-opening experience as an online teacher overseas: I thought I was doing something groundbreaking, unheard of, even daring. Well, it was all these things, for me, but actually, I was only catching up to what many of my students are doing, and really, I’m embarrassed to have been so surprised. Of course I had known that the student body at my college was geographically diverse. Students “live” at the addresses brought to the Student Center to establish residency, but their capital-H Homes are another world away. The student in Germany was caring for her grandmother; the student in the Philippines was on an extended visit to his in-laws. My Taiwanese student had been in Ann Arbor for three years, she wrote, and added that having her instructor be from Ann Arbor but now living in Taipei was “so weird.”
Becoming an “international teacher” didn’t just connect me to the diaspora experience of my students. It also influenced my Shakespeare pedagogy in one significant way: what I learned from, and how I have come to appreciate, ELL students.
Shakespeare as a second language
My ELL students in Shakespeare are at a high level with their English, a much higher level than I was in Mandarin Chinese; I was a beginner, and my students have to test into “college-level reading and writing” status on the ACT placement test, along with native English speakers, to be able to enroll in any literature class the college offers.
(Next page: the advantage of online learning for writing and comprehension)
Shakespeare, however, presents texts beyond what anyone has been mastering. For example, Othello says that Desdemona’s father,
[…] loved me, oft invited me,
Still questioned me the story of my life,
From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes
That I have passed.
I ran it through even from my boyish days
To th’ very moment that he bade me tell it,
Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my traveller’s history….
(Othello, 1.3.128-138)
There are shortened words that are somewhat recognizable—“oft,” “i’th’,” “scapes.” There are words like “portance” and “bade” that may be clear in context—but maybe not, when the context includes words like “accidents,” “passed,” and “chances” in ways we don’t typically use them. There are also obscure words like “breach” and obsolete words like “thence.” My Shakespeare classes contain mostly native English speakers, but everyone, regardless of origin or background, I’d like to classify as an “SLL” student: a Shakespeare Language Learner.
For the ELL student, though, being an SLL is a particular challenge. A Turkish student, for example, e-mailed me to say he doubted he had the language skills to stay in the class. For the first play we read, he used some “modern English” translations he had found online, but he struggled even with that text. He then found modern-day Turkish translations of Shakespeare, which helped with his reading, but not his writing, the text that is most important of all, because this is the text by which he earned his grade. So, his extra work meant he could succeed as a reader of Shakespeare, but not yet as a Shakespeare student in my class.
To read, perchance to write—ay, there’s the rub.
The great advantage of online education
To write about any work of literature effectively, students have to quote and discuss the text they analyze. As they lead up to a quote like “Wherefore art thou, Romeo” and follow it, they have to contextualize the language and incorporate it in their writing. When this is done well, it demonstrates their understanding, their personal translation of the text.
It takes practice, and here is the great advantage of teaching literature online: everything students do in my class is written. Instead of having face-to-face discussions in a classroom (which students may or may not participate in), my students respond weekly to a prompt on a discussion board. They write their responses and reply to each other, expanding on or debating ideas with their peers.
Earlier I asked what, in an online class, is “in focus if the student is never seen?” This is it: their writing, their quotations, their contextualization and interpretation of passages from Shakespeare’s plays, which is to say, their translation. This word itself, to “translate,” means to “carry across.” In my students’ weekly discussions, they carry Shakespeare’s work across what often seem to be peaks and valleys of their learning process—their grasp of meaning and loss of it, their epiphanic interpretation and dismayed confusion—and into their own written work.
This awareness of translation also brings to light what my students have in common with me, and here again I found myself feeling a surprising connection to a common student experience. I may know that “’ere” means “before,” but with each Shakespearian play I join my students in reading and writing about, I continue to translate the staggering eloquence found in his lines. I’ll teach Shakespeare for as long as my boss will let me; I’ll be an SLL student for life.
Brian Goedde is a lecturer in the English department at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury, Connecticut. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. This article was excerpted from “Shakespeare in Taiwan: Teaching Online in a Global Community,” published in the NEA peer-reviewed journal Thought & Action, 2014 edition. To read the entire article, visit the NEA website.
- 25 education trends for 2018 - January 1, 2018
- IT #1: 6 essential technologies on the higher ed horizon - December 27, 2017
- #3: 3 big ways today’s college students are different from just a decade ago - December 27, 2017