“O Brave New World”: Service-Learning and Shakespeare

Community-engaged learning is a rising feature of a wide variety of higher education institutions, from community colleges to private liberal arts colleges to large public universities. Everyone, it seems, is getting in on the act, and as a result, the amount of scholarship published on service-learning continues to multiply. There remains, however, curiously little scholarship published on the intersection of service-learning and literary studies. Almost no published scholarship exists on how courses on Shakespeare— ­a staple of nearly every college English department— ­might engage with the community through service-learning that provides a genuine community benefit while simultaneously deepening undergraduate students’ engagement with and understanding of Shakespeare. This essay seeks to address that absence by describing a program for utilizing service-learning in a Shakespeare course and offering a discussion of the learning outcomes of the project for its central constituencies.