Oh, Brave New World: Horizontalist Learning and Cultural Exchange in the Literature Classroom 

Boyda Johnstone, English

“Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

We all know that the COVID-19 pandemic caused multiple intersecting crises on various fronts, including isolation on a number of physical, social, emotional levels.  When ex-Governor Cuomo issued the “NY State on PAUSE” executive order just over two years ago and I found myself suddenly unsure if I would ever see my students in the flesh again (and I didn’t), I vocalized my hope on Facebook that we would be back in a few short weeks and that we wouldn’t take such extreme measures as places that had sent the students home for the entire semester. I’m not always proud of my initial stunned reactions to a disease that previously had felt distant and divided by oceans, and that was about to decimate a sizable percentage of New York City. But teaching to me has always been an embodied practice, one that profits from uncomfortable encounters with other humans whose backgrounds and generational perspectives have the ability to offset our own. As someone who has never been comfortable lecturing, it’s been very natural for me to strive for a flipped and dynamic in-person classroom with as many voices and perspectives represented as possible. The classroom is a participatory stage, not one where a silent and rapt audience listens to a sole performance by an expert, but a community production with blurred distinctions between actors and auditors who variously swap roles, where members learn from the material through hesitant and uncertain experimentation.

Gradually as we grew more familiar with Zoom technology and realized we could share a cocktail with folks living in comparable isolation across the globe, it became clear that interactive experiences need not be relegated to the physical setting, and new kinds of communities could form through the pandemic. In my Fall 2021 writing-intensive “British Literature I: Medieval to Eighteenth Century” course, inspired by the COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) program first developed at SUNY, I taught Shakespeare’s most famous staging of colonialism and conquest in the new world, The Tempest, and paired the class with a comparable course taught by my friend and colleague Alexandra Verini at Ashoka University outside New Delhi, India. Verini’s course dealt explicitly with ‘cultural encounters,’ and most of the texts my class was reading similarly involved confronting unfamiliar Others such as monsters and shrieking mystical women, leading us into discussions about compassion across difference as well as the value of imaginative travel, especially as we were still, for the most part, consigned to our home city and home apartments by the pandemic. It made a lot of sense under these conditions to design a unit that spanned mass geographical and temporal boundaries in our own time, staging a different kind of cultural encounter–a digital Globe theatre, if you will.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, The Tempest takes place on an island where the usurped duke Prospero has raised his daughter Miranda for the past twelve years while enslaving the native islander Caliban and dominating the fairy spirit Ariel. In contravention to her father’s attempt to control her memory and understanding of the world, Miranda experiences a slow awakening throughout the play after a shipwreck leaves a group of Italian nobles scattered across their shore. In her famous final speech she exclaims “How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world / That has such people in ‘t” (5.1.217-8). Meanwhile, Caliban harnesses a competing claim to sovereignty over the island, declaring that “This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me” (1.2.396-7) and committing to use his newfound facility with English to curse. Thus the play upholds the power of education as well as the power of resistance against oppression, perhaps extending to resistance against Eurocentric interpretations of and conventional approaches to the play itself.

Our classes would be divided into 6 groups, each group paired with a group from the other school, and each shared group assigned a scene from The Tempest to act out or adapt somehow in a recording that would be shared. The project was split into three main parts: video introductions, where each group member introduced themselves to their paired groups; the central adaptations, which for the acting-hesitant could incorporate as much creative technology as they wished; and reviews, where groups would offer praise and constructive feedback to the corresponding adaptations from the other university. Admittedly, the assignment was complicated and there were undoubtedly some hitches along the way. Coordinating schedules turned out to be the main challenge on our end, and it was tricky to establish clear lines of communication between groups, and to keep track of all the various links and videos. I only had about 18 active or semi-active students while Ashoka had 35, creating a corresponding imbalance in participation. Unfortunately, one of my groups ended up dissolving, and a couple others completed their assignments very late, in contrast with the very punctual Ashoka students (Ashoka, by the way, is an elite private school which is sometimes referred to as the “Princeton of India”). It was stressful to realize that the Ashoka students’ grades were dependent on the BMCC students completing their workload in a timely manner, and consequently I had to do quite a bit of coaxing and prodding, not all of which was successful.

In spite of uneven outcomes, I am very grateful we did this. As with so much of our teaching, and in defiance of an increasingly neoliberal system that demands concrete “deliverables” and statistics that validate and prove the ‘success’ of our methods, the profitable outcomes of such experiments emerge more through the messiness of the process than through the final product. In their poignant and confessional introduction videos, which asked students to respond to three of five questions about the class and their experiences of the pandemic, we learned about shared struggles with focus, loneliness, anxiety, and fear, and students weaved these personal reflections in with their processing of course material. Ashoka students regaled us with enthusiasm for the sixteenth-century Hindu mystic poet Mirabai, wildly popular in India but little-known here, while BMCC students gushed over the treacherous journey Gawain sets out on in the fifteenth-century alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ashoka students were also enthusiastic about my students’ work, offering generous and extensive reviews of our videos.  

Regarding the adaptations, on our end one group coalesced extremely well, producing a long modernized script for the “Milan Gang” that incorporated emojis and gifs as they transferred the shipwreck to a texting group chat setting (fig. 1). Despite my suspicion that men on a sinking ship during a superstorm might prefer to communicate face-to-face, and that an abandoned island in the seventeenth century might not have sufficient outlets for their phone chargers, we all suspended our disbelief and laughed along with them. Another group translated their scene into a Twitter exchange, complete with the 1610 date, and got a voice actor to read out the part of Prospero (Fig. 2). Another group took a more conventional approach to acting out their scene, adding in some tasteful musical selections as well as visual aids, and it’s quite clear from Fig. 3 how much they enjoyed working together. Another group used Tiktok to act out a modernized version of the scene, reciting memorized lines and making use of the digital features of that app to enhance their production. And finally, one group put together what I affectionately called a “stoner” version of Caliban’s drunken escapades with Stefano and Trinculo, transferring the play’s comedic B-plot into a modern office setting (fig. 4). Channeling the show The Office, here the chief players scheme to start their own competing business while toking up, adding an extra degree of bravado to their plans. Stephano and Trinculo adopt Caliban as their pawn to overthrow the exploitative boss, Prospero, and having been won over, Caliban finally agrees to quit his job–though not only does he agree to quit, he also declares at the end he wants to murder Prospero, an escalation that leaves the other two schemers in shock. Their script is professionally written and polished and their acting spirited and hilarious, even with one fewer actor than they had initially expected.

Even if the final products are not perfectly polished or executed, the students generally commented that they benefited both from the close deliberation with Shakespeare’s text as well as the chance to connect with each other during such a lonely era (one student remarked that it was nice just to be able to see his classmates’ faces over Zoom, since we were consigned to a masked-only classroom when we came together). These “collaborative learning experiences”  ask students to produce meaning horizontally while mastering understanding of the source text and engaging in such higher-order thinking as analysis and critical reflection, moving from a perception of knowledge as static and rote to dynamic and contingent.^[1] Their experiments with technology highlight the differences between the present and the past even while shared motifs seep through. One member of the Milan Gang commented that “each member of the group worked equally on this project and held many roles. We all agreed acting wasn’t our strongest suit, so we decided to make a text message conversation. Mariam^[2] created the Word document we all worked on, Samiya edited all our videos, and we all collectively created the script for the video. Alex kept us motivated whenever any of us began to panic, and Mariam kept constant communication with the professor. […] My personal biggest challenge was finding quiet time to record the project, and I’m thankful this group was understanding and worked with me.”

Given the many scheduling restraints placed on community college students and a general spectrum of college preparedness, some professors I know avoid group projects (not just dramaturgical ones) like the plague. The study of Shakespeare can also be difficult in a setting where many students come from marginalized backgrounds, far removed from the archaic language of the white European setting. But such assignments can become transformative within and through their frustrating and messy nature, fostering the classroom as a space where knowledge is produced collectively and dynamically, in our case even alongside a classroom on the other side of the globe. As a play that has been considered from many postcolonialist perspectives over the years, The Tempest lends itself to such local decentering, helping the students distance themselves from the vexed and hierarchical question of what Shakespeare himself would have wanted or intended. Rather, the students themselves are the creators of the drama, and the center of the course. In an article published for LitHub entitled “Caliban Never Belonged to Shakespeare” by a former CUNY student, Marcos Gonsalez describes studying the play in a classroom with a tenured white professor who “shoots down [his] ideas because they are inflected by race and sexuality,” feeling himself like a Caliban in a world of authoritative Prosperos.^[3] He inverts the traditional academic positioning of Caliban by positing that “Caliban was and is and will always be us. Us, who have mother tongues stripped from them and languages foreign imposed upon them, those who have masters and those who have been conquered, those who have been told they think incorrectly or they dream too ambitiously or they write too dangerously.”

By the same token, I find value in pushing my students to make Shakespeare their own, to invert and collapse and explode the original text in loving, strategic, whimsical, irreverent ways. In this sense I additionally follow the guidance of Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed who challenges us to move beyond false generosity and engage in the risky process of co-creating meaning in an anti-hierarchical fashion, helping students build confidence and trust in their own insights and abilities. Students in these moments can assume the role of teacher in the classroom and move from the position of spectator to the position of performer.^[4] Partnering with Ashoka University was an experiment in unfamiliar encounters with unfamiliar material, and I’m sure some of the students actually thought it was torture. Hopefully at the end of it all, they, like Ariel finally by the end of the play, felt freer and more empowered to approach future challenges with a similar creative and dynamic spirit.

Note: a version of this paper was presented at the BMCC English department Transitions and Transactions conference, April 9, 2022.

^[1] See Davd Hennessy and Ruby Evans, “Small-Group Learning in the Community College Classroom,” Community College Enterpreise (2006). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234565475_Small-Group_Learning_in_the_Community_College_Classroom

^[2] Names have been changed.

^[3] Marcos Gonsalez, “Caliban Never Belonged to Shakespeare: What Shakespeare’s ‘Thing of Darkness’ Tells Us about Gatekeeping and Language,” LitHub, July 26, 2010. Caliban Never Belonged to Shakespeare ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com)

^[4] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (Penguin, 1970), ch. 2.

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