Exploring the Power of Rhetoric in Julius Caesar

Join Dr. Deborah Gascon, an English teacher at Dutch Fork High School, for an interactive one-hour professional development session to explore fresh, practical ways to bring Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to life with your students. Together we will: 

• Discuss strategies to draw students into the political and personal stakes of Julius Caesar.  

• Work with Brutus and Antony’s funeral orations to help students wrestle with rhetoric, persuasion, and shifting loyalties. 

• Use Folger Essential Practices like Choral Reading and Cutting the Text that make Shakespeare’s language vivid and immediate, inviting students to experience its power and complexity. 

• Move from analysis to action: Use the death of Cinna the Poet to show how rhetoric shapes collective response and help students craft their own purposeful arguments.