Walking in Shakespeare’s Shoesproposes and explores a historical and cultural approach to teaching Shakespeare, situating the plays and sonnets in a tumultuous early modern world. The narrative structure invites teachers to imagine how middle and high school students connect with rigorous and older texts. Using Steelman’s approach to teaching Shakespeare not only helps students in secondary grades connect to the work, but also raises academic and intellectual expectations. Once students begin to see that Shakespeare’s characters react to their sixteenth-century world the same way that students react to their own twenty-first-century culture, the distance melts and students are better able to understand Shakespeare’s relevance in today’s world.

Organized by play, each chapter illuminates the versatility of the approach through examples of how early modern primary sources can be incorporated partially or fully into any pedagogical approach to Shakespeare. Realistic accounts of how diverse students engage withRomeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth,andA Midsummer Night’s Dream,the four most commonly taught plays in middle and high schools today, are the centerpiece of the book. Two chapters on the sonnets and Shakespeare Book Clubs share practical techniques for working with several texts to explore how religion, politics, family, and cultural norms permeate his writing. Class discussions and student work, as well as teacher thoughts and observations, narrate, illustrate, and provide evidence for the value of the approach.

295 pp. 2022. Grades 7–12