Shakespeare & Social Justice
A New ASPDP Course
For NYC Teachers
Fall 2025
During this 15-hour course, you will:
- Explore the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Social Justice Standards and learn how to guide your students to create essential questions about identity, diversity, justice, and action in complex texts
- Work with our toolkit for ELA and humanities teachers to build safe & brave spaces for social justice conversations the way that professional artists do in a rehearsal room
- Discover on-your-feet activities to deepen your students’ critical thinking about power, agency, and social change in the complex texts you study
- Build a "rehearsal room" with your fellow teachers for designing, testing, and assessing new lesson plans based on your learning
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Middle and high school teachers of any grade or subject are welcome! Although the course is designed with ELA and humanities teachers in mind, teachers of advanced theatre classes, or any subject that engages deeply with text, will also find it useful.
While we'll use Shakespeare's text in our workshop, the takeaways can apply to any complex text that invites critical interpretation.
4 In-Person Sessions
Fee: $45
- Sunday, Oct 5, 9am-1pm
- Monday, Oct 13, 2pm-6pm
- Tuesday, Nov 11, 8am-12pm
- Saturday, Dec 13, 9am-11am
At TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Downtown Brooklyn:
262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY 11217
NYCPS Teachers
To receive full CTLE and salary differential A+/P credit for this course you must register here and *ALSO* register with ASPDP on their website. If you do not complete the ASPDP registration, you will not be eligible for A+ or P credits towards your salary differential.
Questions? Reach out to TFANA Education Director Lindsay Tanner at [email protected] or call 212.229.2819 x18.
TFANA, an NYCPS partner since 1984, created this course through a USDOE-funded collaboration with the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, the Southern Poverty Law Center, scholars of early modern critical race studies at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and theaters across the country, to foster social justice values and actions through the teaching of Shakespeare.
Through a constructivist, embodied learning approach, we use Shakespeare as a vehicle to develop lifelong practices of readers and writers – persevering through challenging, complex texts; making connections to self, other texts, ideas, and cultures; experimenting and playing with language – alongside lifelong practices of engaged participants in civic life, leading to 21st-century learners who reflect critically on themselves, society, and systems, and are prepared to take collective action against bias and towards justice.
