All the Power This Charm Doth Owe: Teaching Under Shakespeare's Spell - Tapa blanda

For 15 years, two or three or sometimes even four times a year, during and after school, I did real theater with students between the ages of 10 and 18. In their words and mine, this is our story. How we learned, together, to make ourselves into a theater troupe. How we created the bonds of trust that made everything possible. How we made Shakespeare’s words come alive. How we sustained each other with processing circles and trust-building games. How we learned to believe in each other and ourselves, and looking back, what it meant to us in the end....This is a book about transformation, about how words written 400 years ago changed my life and the lives of my students.

Robert DeWeese taught grades four through eight in the North Kitsap School District of Washington State for many years. A lifelong interest in the works of William Shakespeare, and a passion for helping students learn interdependence and mutual trust, led him to build his curriculum around in-class and after-school performances of Shakespeare’s plays. Field trips to live theater at Seattle Shakespeare and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival were a regular part of his theater project, and his students performed in parks, nursing homes, shopping malls, and even on board a Washington State ferry, as well as onstage in schools and classrooms. In 2002, DeWeese was one of two Washington State teachers to receive an ING Unsung Heroes Award. The author has also written two full-length plays for secondary students. Hard Times (2009) is centered around the struggle of ordinary families to survive the Great Depression of the 1930s; and Bring the War Home (2010) is about the conflicts within the movement to resist the war in Vietnam.