Shakespeare and Film
Abstract:
Our goal is to develop new ways to teach film in both literature and film studies classes at Kenyon and Denison by exploring the uses of digital technology. We intend to focus this process on the joint development of a course entitled "Shakespeare and Film," which will allow us to integrate this new technology directly into our development of course content. By using students to help us develop, implement, and assess this new technology, we hope to make our collaboration a broader experience of teaching and learning: we expect to learn from our students, to challenge them to imagine new ways to learn, and to give them an opportunity to expand their own knowledge of these new technologies. Finally, we plan to share our experience with our colleagues who teach classes that combine film and literature, so that they can draw upon our experience in making their own experiments with this new technology.
Our proposal has three phases: (1) learning and assessing the potential applications of new technologies for teaching film; (2) developing a course ("Shakespeare and Film") that makes use of these new technologies; and (3) assessing the success of these new technologies as we teach this course at each institution. We plan to use only programs currently available to faculty at both institutions (including web-based digital media, collaborative websites, Course Info, E-Res, electronic bulletin boards, and PowerPoint), and to use student computing liaisons and student workers during each phase of the project to help us learn, implement, and assess these new approaches. We expect to begin the initial phase of learning the technology in late July, and to do the course development during the fall. We will hire students to do the digitizing and programming work during academic year 2000-2001, so that the films will be ready for Lisa McDonnell to teach this course at Denison in the spring term. Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky will draw upon her experience to make any necessary changes before teaching the course in the fall of 2001. During the summer of 2001, we will assess any additional technological requirements for bringing these materials into the classroom, and make proposals for hardware upgrades to our individual institutions. We expect that both courses may be running simultaneously during the fall term, allowing us to explore the possibilities for collaborative projects among the students.