Coming of Age in Shakespeare: A-Levels to University: Carol Atherton Reports on a Discussion About Teaching Shakespeare at the British Shakespeare Association's Annual Conference (Subject Matter: Reflections on Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment) (Conference News) (Discussion‪)‬

Panel Chair: Sean McEvoy (Varndean College, Brighton) Panellists: Carol Atherton (Bourne Grammar School), Ewan Fernie (Royal Holloway University of London), Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex), Michelle O'Callaghan (University of Reading), Luke Walters (Reading Blue Coat School) First, a disclaimer. I get very twitchy about the issue of transition. I am uneasy with the deficit model that it seems to set up: the assumption that students are not adequately prepared for degree level study and that this is because teachers aren't doing their jobs properly. Second, a bit of an excuse: if students aren't prepared for the study of Shakespeare at university, then wasn't it ever thus? I'm not sure I was fantastically well prepared for my study of Shakespeare at degree level, back in the early 1990s. I was, however, very well prepared for the Shakespeare questions I had to answer at A-level; and that was, after all, my teachers' main job: I knew my set plays inside-out and back to front, and could write on them in three-hour long closed-text exams that would make my current students blanch. My study of Shakespeare at university demanded something very different: an ability to move between plays and genres, to have a sense of performance history, and to see Shakespeare as a test-case for critical and theoretical debates. In a sense, I didn't need to be particularly well-prepared, since I didn't 'do' Shakespeare until the final year of my degree (this being Oxford, we had to work our way up to Shakespeare). But the issue of transition was also much less acute then. Today, in a very different kind of educational environment, it generates a huge amount of debate. Yet rarely have these debates taken the form of a sustained face-to-face conversation between representatives from schools and HE, and rarely have they focused on one author. It was perhaps inevitable that when they did, that author would be Shakespeare.