Comments on Prospero’s Island From students:
When we’re reading the book, Miss says, ‘Try and imagine how it looks’ … but when we went to the Punchdrunk we could actually imagine how it was.
When we went through that, we actually felt like Caliban, we actually felt like some of the characters … because like Caliban was locked in and Prospero said he wasn’t going to let us go until we’d completed the levels’.
Before Punchdrunk, it was kind of hard to imagine the situations and atmosphere. Afterwards, everything got easier.
The experience opened my mind on English … a recent enjoyable piece of writing I have experienced was the Tempest since the writing was creative.
It was kind of action … and you were still learning … We did these good things to boost our knowledge about the Tempest, ’cos you can’t really learn everything by reading books.
When we were studying the Tempest and we had to write as Miranda, I was so into the writing that I carried on writing a few minutes after we were supposed to stop! I probably would’ve carried on if my teachers didn’t warn me personally.
During the missions these messages on the walls popped up and we had to read it in his perspective … as if it was us going through it and that’s how we developed the language in our heads.
From teachers:
I think it just allowed them to have a much greater understanding of the plot and different perspectives.
They actively engaged with the text. They found new ways to engage with literature.
My Year 8 class went in last week and their understanding of the play is so good now, like they had a good understanding and now it is just brilliant and they … really know the play and are able to be really critical about it and give different interpretations about it as they understand it better … they have a full understanding of the play that they didn’t have before.
I think they will always take that they had a really fun experience and they will always remember the characters of Prospero and Caliban … they’ll always remember those characters and they’ll know about those characters for their whole life.
I believe that the impact on students was a love of Shakespeare. It made English fun and they saw literature in a new light … there is an excitement around English with my class.
Experiencing The Tempest as a mystery to be solved in and through action and reflection, the students began to explore the play more fully, although sensitive attuned teaching was needed to follow up this work and to build more immersive opportunities into the English curriculum. As one teacher observed:
We are so bogged down with standardized testing and measurement… it becomes such a driving force behind the curriculum and when there are things like this and an opportunity for students and people to be engaged with it, it shows the bigger picture of what education is about … you learn that learning is living and life and you are learning on the go!
1 Salvatore, J (2010) Overcoming fear and resistance when teaching Shakespeare. In D. Wyse, R Andrews and J. Hoffman, The Routledge International Handbook of English, Language and Literary Teaching. Abingdon: Routledge.
2 Department for Education (2014) The National Curriculum in England: Key Stages 3 and 4 Framework Document:
https://www.gov.co.uk/government/ uploads/attachment data/file/381754/SECONDARY national curriculum.pdf. Accessed 24.2.16.
3 Higgin, P. (2012) Evaluation of Under the Eiderdown, London: Punchdrunk Enrichment.
Hackney Learning Trust and the Open University team at the British Library on 29th April for the UKLA Shakespeare conference.
https://ukla.org/conferences/event/ukla-national- conference-2016
The research team also included: Angela Colvert and Lucy Oliver.
Photographs by Teresa Cremin and Paul Cochrane. Copyright Teresa Cremin and Punchdrunk Enrichment/Paul Cochrane. Books for Keeps No.217 March 2016 5
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