AustLit

'Despite widely documented innovations integrating theatrical approaches into secondary school in-classroom engagement with the works of Shakespeare, evidence remains that students and teachers struggle with applying those techniques to the pedagogy of interpretation. Who Killed Desdemona? introduces a clown-based approach to an interpretation of Shakespeare’s play, Othello, within a school familiar setting. The screenplay is undergirded by the theories of John Dewey and Jerome Bruner in scaffolding collaborative processes of situated and authentic learning, and integrates the social and peer-learning paradigms of Lev Vygotsky and Etienne Wenger. The screenplay introduces clown-based play and interactivity with both text and live/video attendant audience in negotiating a process of performance-in-rehearsal, where the clowns critically and irreverently unpack and interpret Shakespeare’s text through intermittent discourse and enactment.'  (Publication abstract)