Teaching Shakespeare: Chairs, Jazz, Perfume & Balloons

Duncan Driver and Lexi Sukeless

Co-presented by an actor and an education academic, this workshop will engage participants in activities and other classroom strategies that work to scaffold students’ knowledge and understanding of Shakespeare, with a discrete but transferable focus on the sonnets. It will examine elements of the sonnet form that make this text type ideal for teaching purposes, but the focus of the workshop combines English and Drama pedagogies in order to illustrate a range of ways that teachers may differentiate instruction when teaching Shakespeare and work to excite their students’ curiosity for the bard and what meanings they can construct from his poetry.

About Duncan

Dr Duncan Driver is an Assistant Professor of Education and the Program Director for Secondary Education at the University of Canberra. He began his career as a tutor, lecturer and course convenor in the Department of English at the Australian National University, and has gone on to work as a journalist for the Canberra Times, an artistic director of Canberra’s Everyman Theatre and a teacher of secondary English, History, Drama and Philosophy at Gungahlin College. His PhD research investigated aspects of Shakespeare studies and movements in literary criticism, leading to articles for Melbourne Scholarly Publishing and Iona College’s Shakespeare Newsletter (New York). More recently, Duncan has published “Writer, Reader, Student, Teacher” in English in Australia, “Poetry and Perspective” in Idiom, “Reflecting Windows” in Screen Education and “Wordsworth’s We Are Seven: Reflections on the Secondary English Classroom” in Changing English. Along with Lexi Sekuless, he is an artistic director of Canberra’s ‘Shakespeare by the Lakes’ festival.

About Lexi

Lexi Sekuless graduated from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama on their Bachelor of Acting program with first class honours. During her time she learnt acting craft and technique from some of the UK’s top tutors. Her career highlight was performing at the Globe as ‘Lady Anne’ in Richard III for the 2013 Wanamaker Festival. Lexi also performed in her own one women show about Marilyn Monroe, a version of which will return to Canberra later this year. Her training specialised in classic texts such as Chekhov and Shakespeare and included techniques from Mike Alfred, Uta Hagen, Sandford Meisner, Cicely Berry and Kristen Linklater. Since returning to Australia, Lexi has been working as a voice-over artist and began teaching acting and voice around Canberra. Along with Duncan Driver, she is an artistic director of Canberra’s ‘Shakespeare By the Lakes’ festival.