Shakespeare & Violence Prevention: A Practical Handbook for Educators

Shakespeare and Violence Prevention is a handbook that guides educators through an exploration of Shakespeare’s potential to address the public health issue of youth violence. Amanda Giguere presents Shakespeare’s plays as a tool to understand, address root causes of, and prevent violence in our own communities. Performance-based engagement with the plays in an educational setting allows students to explore violence-prevention strategies, practice empathy, and build safer communities. Youth violence is an all too relevant topic, and this text helps educators, theatre companies, and academic theatre departments understand new ways in which the performing arts can positively impact young people.

Framed by examples from Giguere’s work with the Shakespeare & Violence Prevention program, an interdisciplinary outreach project for K-12 schools developed at the University of Colorado Boulder, the text offers helpful entry points, digestible research, and practical exercises to align a violence-prevention curriculum with Shakespeare’s plays. It provides a condensed overview of key findings from violence prevention, clear synopses of the plays, and practicable strategies to implement the program. Guided by firsthand experience with a tried-and-true school program that reaches thousands of K-12 students annually, Giguere shares the Colorado Shakespeare Festival method, which focuses on ＂upstander＂ roleplays to practice violence-prevention strategies. Using a clear distillation of Shakespeare studies and violence-prevention research, she shows how the two fields naturally reinforce the concepts of teamwork, empathy, change, and hope.

Shakespeare and Violence Prevention is a new spin on these classic texts that empowers teachers and community leaders to use these tools to create research-guided university engagement programs, theatre company outreach programs, and K-12 student engagement with Shakespeare, even for those without expertise in violence prevention or Shakespeare.

Amanda Giguere is the Director of Outreach for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, where she oversees all education and outreach programming. She also teaches for CU Boulder’s Applied Shakespeare certificate program. She holds an MA and PhD in Theatre from CU Boulder.