A Pedagogical Pilot: A Folger Consortium First in Undergraduate Education

“How will this fadge?” asks Viola in Twelfth Night. Or, as she quickly rephrases, “What will become of this?” As we embarked on our pedagogical experiment— four institutions, 39 students, 18 weeks, three professors and one joint trip to the Folger by train, plane, and metro—who knew what would happen? The word “fadge” builds in the possibility of failure: see Oxford English Dictionary, “fadge,” definition 4, “To fit in with or suit the surroundings; hence to get on, succeed, thrive. Of an event: To come off. Often with indefinite subject:…it won’t fadge.” For one rollicking semester made up of equal parts careful scripting and improv, we brought together classes from our Folger Consortium Institutions (Amherst College, George Mason University, and the University of Delaware) for a journey through a different Shakespearean comedy: As You Like It. At the end of our co-teaching experience we are happy to report: it fadged.

The course was a hybrid in many respects. Not only did we meet partly in person (Tuesdays were for regular classes on our respective campuses) and partly remotely (Thursdays were for shared Zoom meetings), but the course also integrated the modern and the early modern, the Folger Theater and the Globe Theater, Washington D.C. and Shakespeare’s London. The course was titled “Shakespeare’s Places, Publics, and Platforms,” and this allowed us to wander freely through forests and streetscapes; think about theatergoers and urban pedestrians; and consider the architecture of theatrical stages and of websites. Along the way, we discovered that the three of us were scholarly companions with diverse interests that aligned surprisingly well. From Anston’s work on leather to Kristen’s writings on trees to Holly’s theorizing of the early modern senses, our ideas came together in a way that was cohesive and fun.

The course revolved around As You Like It. In the original planning, this was simply because it would be on stage at the Folger Theatre during our time together. But unexpectedly, the play began to structure our experience. Like Rosalind, Celia, Touchstone and Duke Senior’s court, we found ourselves displaced from our usual habitats: classrooms, institutional cultures, and pedagogical routines. There were, truth be told, moments where the strangeness of it all–sharing teacherly responsibility, testing experimental assignments, encountering new technologies–was disconcerting. But whatever discomfort came from leaving our respective ivory towers for the forest was overshadowed by the thrill of the adventure. The high point was our collective site visit to the Folger. Students who had been working together through discussion boards and Zoom breakout rooms were able to meet in person. The abstraction of “the Folger” became a material reality.

Here were our focal points:

Place

The situatedness of perspective was baked into the course. As instructors who have taught at our respective institutions for some time, we are accustomed to their peculiarities—a privilege, but also a limit. Partnering with one another gave us a chance to see them anew. GWU’s urban setting and Amherst’s bucolic one, for instance, helped us to think about the forms of positionality that shaped our students’ learning outcomes. Some were practical: how many pages could we assign for shared sessions? How much time would it take for our students to arrive safely at the Folger? Others were political: would an assignment that would fly at a private university expose our peers at a public university? How could we honor the unique needs of our students and still cultivate a collective experience that was meaningful for all? These questions also became a pathway for exploring the past. As we tried to emphasize in our shared lectures on Zoom, exploring the realities of staging or attending a play in early modern London allowed us to take up questions about the politics of the arts in the past with an awareness of how embodied difference was shaping those dynamics in the present.

Platforms

Our course asked students to think across the multiple platforms that carry Shakespeare’s works into public life. These ranged from the early modern stage to the Folger’s theatre and exhibition spaces, and further to digital platforms such as our project management software Basecamp, The Renaissance World database, and online archives. Since our students included theater majors, self-avowed book nerds, and prolific users of social media, we hoped the emphasis on platforms would help them see the material supports that mediate both our access to the past and our designs for the future. Pausing midway through the course for work in our respective libraries’ special collections departments was a welcome break from Zoom, but also prepared our students for a hands-on Folger workshop with a selection of rare materials. Students were inspired by the library associates’ energetic ways of bringing those to life! It also invited students to think about their own schools as public and private institutions, with unique histories similar to those explored in the course. 

Publics 

Who are cultural institutions for? Our course treated cultural institutions not as neutral containers for books or performance, but as platforms that imagine and produce particular publics. Among institutions, we included broad formations such as the Shakespeare industry, discussing Cliff Cardinal’s As You Like It: A Radical Retelling, which pushes back on the canon by using Shakespeare as a bait-and-switch to confront harms inflicted on Indigenous communities by schools and churches. We also examined material structures: the early modern Globe in its London context, but also the Folger with its architectural renovations, exhibition halls, and Elizabethan theater. Instructor-guided walks around Capitol Hill and the National Mall placed these questions in a contemporary civic landscape, where the nation’s libraries and museums are caught in topical political predicaments. This context sharpened students’ attention to the branding of the Folger’s As You Like It production as “a love letter to DC,” a phrase that raises the central question of “public” address—who is being loved, who is being addressed, and who is being asked to recognize themselves in the institution’s story?

In this heightened moment when so many in our social, academic, and educational communities are under attack, such questions felt anything but abstract. Though we worried these questions would feel too sharp for our students, what we found was that they were up to the challenge. The course gave all of us an opportunity to understand the present via questions about the past, and the past via the present. And to imagine the kinds of publics that are possible.