CultureShake

CultureShake uses Shakespeare’s plays to bring multilingual teaching into the classroom of the 21st century. This three-year research and development project aims to combine the latest findings in multilingual didactics with intercultural communication in order to integrate students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, including refugee children. CultureShake is delivered by project partners from four European countries: the University of Education in Karlsruhe (Germany), the University of Primorska (Slovenia), Stiftelsen English School Gothenburg (Sweden), Friedrich-Wöhler-Gymnasium (Germany) and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (UK).

Throughout the project duration we worked with secondary school students from the partner schools involved on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, creating peer teaching activities that incorporate the students' heritage languages into the learning. Further outcomes of the project are a method guide, an online dictionary compiled by the students themselves, and a handbook for cultural exchange programmes. Details of the project activities are available on the CultureShake website.

All materials created as part of the project are now freely available for download:

Shakespeare in the 21st-Century Classroom: A Method Guide for Teachers:

• English version
• German version
• Swedish version
• Slovene version

Guidelines for the compilation of a Shakespeare Terminological Dictionary

• English version
• German version
• Swedish version
• Slovene version
• Italian version

Concept for the Development of Peer Teaching Material

• English version
• German version
• Swedish version

Exchanging Culture Shakes: A Teacher Manual for Multilingual and Transcultural School Exchanges

• English version
• German version
• Swedish version
• Slovene version
• Italian version

Module for Further Teacher Education

In September 2017 we hosted the second of three workshop weeks at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon. After the week we created a slideshow of all the different activities the CultureShake students carried out together.

If you would like to read up on CultureShake news from the Trust, they are available on our blog pages. 

The project was funded through Erasmus Plus and finished in October 2019.