Shakespeare Education Experience

 

Nashville Shakespeare Festival: Shakespeare Education Experience (SEE) Tour

The Nashville Shakespeare Festival’s Shakespeare Education Experience (SEE) Tour, Nashville, Tennessee, brings live theatre to economically disadvantaged schools and/or schools in geographically isolated communities who need better access to arts education opportunities.

Mission

The Shakespeare Education Experience Tour, or SEE Tour is a program of the Nashville Shakespeare Festival, whose mission is to educate and entertain the Mid-South community through professional theatrical experiences. The Festival enriches and unifies our community with bold, innovative and relevant productions along with empowering, participatory educational programs, setting the community standard of excellence in educational outreach and performances of Shakespeare’s plays.

The SEE Tour expands the capability of Nashville Shakespeare Festival to create accessible arts education opportunities for students and educators throughout the region who need an alternative option when traditional field trip experiences are out-of-reach. By bringing professional artists and their work directly to schools, and through optimizing the experience to meet the curricular and logistical needs of teachers, the SEE Tour helps remove barriers to arts access affecting underserved rural and urban classrooms.

Across nearly four decades, Nashville Shakespeare Festival (or NSF) has pursued a mission to entertain and educate the Mid-South community through professional theatrical experiences. We work to enrich and unify our community with bold, innovative and relevant productions along with empowering, participatory educational programs, setting the community standard of excellence in educational outreach and performances of Shakespeare’s plays.

Vision

Education is an essential element of the Nashville Shakespeare Festival’s mission and identity, and “Expanding Arts Access” is cited as one of our five core values. We believe theatre should never feel out of reach. By lowering barriers and opening doors, NSF invites more people to experience the joy and wonder of live performance. In Tennessee, as with much of the nation, those barriers to access have steadily increased for students and educators over several decades as funding for our schools continues to diminish yearly.

This reduction in schools’ capacity to provide their students with arts and other enrichment opportunities runs counter to numerous studies which have regularly documented the beneficial effects of engaging with learning encounters beyond the classroom.  Research has indicated time and again that engaging with curriculum outside of typical classroom studies increases critical thinking skills as well as prosocial skills including tolerance and empathy, not to mention that students who engage in these experiences achieve better grades and have higher graduation rates for high school and college. Moreover, arts engagement specifically (as opposed to science- or history-related experiences) improves writing achievement, reduces discipline issues, and increases engagement with other school subjects.

For all these reasons, the Nashville Shakespeare Festival consistently works to ensure that students and educators in our Mid-State region are able to access professional arts experiences if they choose to, and the Shakespeare Education Experience Tour is a critical component of our collective strategy for achieving this aim. Ensuring a portion of our company’s artistic output is mobile and ready to visit any school within the region lessens the logistical burden of finding transportation for students to get to and from an enrichment experience. Furthermore, this simultaneously negates geographic and time constraint barriers some schools experience by being located too far from Nashville or any other major city to reach a field trip destination, experience it, and return home during the span of regular school hours. The SEE Tour’s ease of access encourages educators to not forgo an opportunity of exposing their students to the benefits of arts and cultural experiences just because of time and transit.

Our drive to increase arts access via the SEE Tour also extends to the funding issues that teachers must confront. While schools with the resources to afford it are charged a fee for services, the Nashville Shakespeare Festival actively anticipates providing free services to between 40-50% of the student populations we interact with during each tour. Underwriting for these services is made possible by program specific grants (such as the “Shakespeare in American Communities” grant by the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest) as well as allocating a portion of all General Operating grants to the program annually. As the reputation of the tour has spread across the region, and as demand for bookings begins to come from schools located ever-further from our home base in Nashville, NSF has begun to look into options for pricing tours which are more distant than a single day trip for our cast. While the primary focus is and will continue to be serving the schools in Metro Nashville and the immediately surrounding counties, our organization has yet to refuse requests to provide services in schools as far away as Northern Alabama, Southern Kentucky, or even further away in East Tennessee. The Nashville Shakespeare Festival is committed to increasing capacity to serve to meet the demands of the educators and students who are most in need of access to vital arts education.

 History

Beginning in 1988 with a lone Shakespeare in the Park program in Nashville which offered admission on a “pay-what-you-will” basis (and continues to do so to this day), NSF has expanded its performance and education options into a diverse slate of programs which provide an array of offerings to multiple communities. The SEE Tour is a crucial component of our efforts to serve individuals with limited access to professional performing arts in Nashville and throughout the entire Middle Tennessee region.

In1992, NSF responded to a request by the Metro Nashville Public School (MNPS) system to help create new options for in-class arts programming. The initial result was “Shakespeare Samplers”, abridged fifty-minute versions of Shakespeare’s best-known plays, which toured to multiple schools with MNPS. Encouraged by the program’s success, NSF began to also partner with a statewide program known as Humanities Outreach Tennessee (or HOT), which worked to both support local arts organizations in developing work for student audiences as well as bring nationally recognized artists to Tennessee for educational performances.

During the HOT partnership in the mid-90s, the Nashville Shakespeare Festival began to broaden the scope of our educational performances beyond Shakespeare to other frequently-taught classics and newer works which served educational purposes; this period of productions featured tours of Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet, interspersed with titles such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and the world premiere of Shakespeare’s Case by Nan Gurley, Denice Hicks, & Claire Syler.

When the 2020 pandemic monumentally altered the landscape for both arts organizations and educators, NSF’s education team endeavored to adapt the program so that the immediate needs of remote learning could still be served with artistic exposure included. Under strict COVID protocols, formerly-touring adaptations of both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet were filmed and then made available for educators to stream directly to their students online. With the pivot to an online presence, the in-class touring shows were for the first time available to schools not geographically located in or near Nashville.

As area schools reopened and began allowing for visiting artist programs again in early 2023, the in-class touring program was rebranded as the Shakespeare Education Experience Tour, or SEE Tour, and has presented one or more offerings annually. With NSF’s education staff growing and its capabilities expanding accordingly, the SEE Tour shows have also branched out beyond just performance. All actors employed on tours are trained NSF Teaching Artists who carry out additional educational content before and after the show.

Activities   

SEE Tour appearances always consist of a performance with talkback, and it may also include pre-performance workshops at the request of the educator in charge. These activities are discussed separately below.

Performances with Talkback    The Shakespeare Education Experience Tour is designed to provide performances of Shakespeare’s most frequently-taught works for educators to use as a supplement to their in-class studies. Shakespeare’s words were meant to be heard in performance rather than solely read as a text, and presenting these pieces in front of students enriches the learning experience, adding spoken context and inflection which cannot always be gleaned from a book. These performances are also tailored to meet the typical time constraints experienced in an educational setting, and utilize carefully abridged scripts which retain all important thematic and structural elements as well as the most literarily notable passages that are essential to understanding and appreciating the work being performed.  Works most frequently offered on a SEE Tour include ROMEO & JULIET, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, MACBETH, and JULIUS CAESAR.

A team of five actors and one company manager travel to a designated school in a vehicle rented for the duration of the tour; the vehicle is often a large passenger van from which rear seats may be removed to accommodate extra space for props, sound equipment, and scenic elements. Upon arrival at the school and making contact with the administration, our entire touring team begins set-up of all equipment. Scenic elements are typically minimal and adaptable to the many varieties of performance spaces (auditoriums, classrooms, gymnasiums, cafeteria, outdoor plazas, etc), and frequently consist of three to five pipe-and-drape panels and some easily-moved small pieces (cubes, pillars, etc) which can be used to represent multiple objects or settings. As in Shakespeare’s time, much of the setting is to be imagined by the audience as guided by descriptions and clues in the dialogue.

During the performance, the company manager acts as Stage Manager and is responsible for operating the sound equipment: a portable speaker and PA system through which wireless microphones, music, and sound effects are amplified. Performers are meanwhile responsible for their own management of props and costume pieces.  During the performance, the company manager often visually scans the audience and makes notes regarding the composition of each crowd, allowing for more accurate demographic reporting afterward.

Immediately following the approximately fifty-minute performance, the team introduces themselves and solicits questions and feedback from the students. The talkback serves as a guided discussion when audiences may be shy or reluctant to initiate interaction, or can be a more traditional question-and-answer session when the students are more willing to jump into the discussion. Following the talkback, the team either resets and prepares for the next performance (when multiple performances are scheduled at a single venue) or begins to dismantle the operation and begin loading all props, costumes, and scenery into the van for transport back to homebase or to the next school.

Upon completion of a day’s touring, the company manager is responsible for completing a feedback form which collects both quantitative data (audience size, demographics, location, etc) and qualitative data (audience reactions, notable questions/comments during talkback, etc) collected that day. The Education Director will typically email educators the following day, sending a link to an online feedback survey which collects their impressions, requests, complaints and/or praises.

Pre-peformance in-class workshops (optional)  When requested, performances can be preceded by one or more in-class workshops led by NSF Teaching Artists who are also members of the SEE Tour cast. These workshops last approximately 50 minutes and focus on performance skills which help to interpret textual clues in Shakespeare’s dialogue. As Shakespeare’s words are meant to be spoken rather than simply read, teachers work with students to extract meaning from the dialogue through performing it aloud with their peers; the intent is not to develop great performers, but rather to utilize the act of embodying and empathizing with a character to unlock a deeper understanding of a character’s motivations, feelings, words, and actions.

 Audiences Served

Students:  The Shakespeare Education Experience Tour serves diverse middle and high school populations. Though originally developed to specifically serve Metro Nashville schools, the tour today partners with schools and other educational entities throughout the region including: public schools, private schools, homeschool collectives, local libraries, and (occasionally) community or senior centers.

The program’s reach affects urban, suburban, and rural institutions, and the travel radius has even begun to stretch into schools in neighboring states. Predominantly, the institutions served are under-resourced schools, which do not have the financial means to transport students to a traditional theater, 50% or more of the student populations at these schools are economically disadvantaged as well. In such cases, performance and workshop services are provided to the schools without charge.

Schools with the resources to pay are charged a program fee, while economically disadvantaged and under-resourced schools may receive performances and workshops at no cost through contributed support and grant underwriting. NSF plans each tour with the expectation that a significant portion of participating students will be served free of charge. SEE Tour bookings may be arranged by a single teacher, grade level, school, homeschool collective, library, community organization, or district. District-wide participation is welcome but not required.

Educators:   The SEE Tour is designed to support educators in teaching works which are already part of their classroom curriculum. Performances are selected and adapted with input from educators, and the accompanying workshops and talkbacks are intended to help students engage more deeply with Shakespeare’s language, characters, and themes. When requested, pre-performance workshops provide students with tools for approaching the text before seeing it performed, while post-performance talkbacks allow educators and students to ask questions, reflect on the production, and connect the performance back to their classroom studies.

Actors:  SEE Tour actors are professional performers who are also trained as NSF Teaching Artists. In addition to rehearsing and performing the touring production, actors receive preparation to lead student workshops, facilitate post-performance talkbacks, and engage directly with middle and high school audiences in an educational setting. Because the cast is responsible for both performance and teaching components of the program, the SEE Tour requires artists who are skilled not only as actors, but also as adaptable, responsive educators.

 Commnity:  Though the SEE Tour primarily serves middle and high school students, the program’s reach also extends to broader community audiences when scheduling allows. Remaining tour dates may be offered to local libraries, community organizations, senior centers, shelters, or other groups who would benefit from access to professional performing arts experiences. In this way, the SEE Tour continues NSF’s larger commitment to bringing Shakespeare and live theatre to audiences who may face financial, geographic, or logistical barriers to attendance.

Successful Impact

Quantitative data is primarily collected to demonstrate the number of individual students and educators served by each SEE Tour.  Since its creation in 1992, the SEE Tours and its previous iterations have reached 45,000+ individuals across the region.

Since the pandemic, individual tours and accompanying workshops reached an average of 2,652 students and teachers annually; 5 tours traveled to 64 student populations in 31 cities across 17 counties, as well as 4 senior centers, and 1 university.

The quotes below represent responses from student letters, educator surveys, and tour reports:

“I appreciate you for coming and performing Romeo and Juliet.  I enjoyed the old English you spoke.  It’s inspired me to want to see more classical plays as an adult.” – Allyn, student, Johnson Learning Center, 2023

“Nashville Shakes brought Shakespeare in a van to our rural school, giving our students an incredible cultural, artistic and educational experience that they could not receive in a classroom! We can’t wait to have them back!” – Christa Nichols, teacher, Dickson County High, 2024

“This was a great way to bring the play to life, and you all gave us a good sense of how actors approach the material, which is great for students who are struggling with the text. The play itself was super engaging and you could feel it winning the kids over, and the Q&A was great – open, engaging, and interesting. I would highly recommend it to anyone who’s doing a unit over [Macbeth] – it was a great supplement and a nice reminder of how Shakespeare is meant to be seen. The workshop was also fantastic. You won over a lot of reluctant learners and the kids were very engaged – I have heard lots of glowing reviews from sophomores, and that’s no small feat!” – Josh Mauthe, teacher Pope Saint John Paul II Prep, 2024

“This might have been the best touring show I’ve seen. [Julius Caesar] is NOT one of my favorite Shakes plays, but they made it sooooo much fun and so entertaining!! Several of my students said things like ‘I didn’t think I’d like it, but I really did! It was so good!’” – Leah Henley, teacher, West Creek High, 2025

“You could see lightbulbs going off in student brains as they watched and connected the performances to what they had read. For most of our students, it was the first play they had ever seen live, and has sparked their interest in live performance.” – Elijah Ammen, teacher, Stratford High, 2024

Recommendations for replication

• First and foremost, the SEE Tour is intended to assist educators in teaching texts which they would already be teaching, with or without accessibility to a live performance component.
• A crucial starting point is to confer with educators in your area to determine what classical plays align with local required reading or suggested reading lists. SEE focuses on Shakespeare, but other groups might have need for non-Shakespeare works such as FAUSTUS by Christopher Marlowe, or EVERYMAN by anonymous. Contemporary works such as THE CRUCIBLE by Arthur Miller or various works of Tennessee Williams give students the benefit of hearing dialogue spoken aloud rather than simply read.
• Scheduling: It is also important to coordinate with area educators and administrators to determine what time of the school year is most beneficial to offer this program. In prior years, many Middle Tennessee schools were eager to invite performances during the spring semester. We have found that the SEE Tour Program is best provided in late October through mid-November to accommodate more schools.
• It is helpful to gain insight from education partners about what their best time to be approached for booking will be. Due to different districts’ budgeting procedures, some schools booking a fall tour are best approached near the end of the preceding spring semester, while others may be unable to make such commitments until the start of the intended school year.  Keeping track of each district’s and/or school’s policies can be crucial.
• While being accommodating should always be a goal, too much flexibility can also become a hindrance. Unless a tour will be spanning several months, it can help focus sales/bookings to offer only one work per tour, and to rotate various titles from year to year.  Offering multiple titles in a single year may be tempting from the perspective of being a double/triple threat, but it can also hamper focused booking efforts and leave casts misaligned to do multiple shows/locations in a single day due to an inability to fit multiple sets/costumes/props in the touring vehicle at once.

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 Contact info

Program website: https://www.nashvilleshakes.org/see-tour

Katie Bruno, Education Director, Nashville Shakespeare Festival

katie@nashvilleshakes.org          (615) 255-2273

Jason Spelbring, Artistic Director, Nashville Shakespeare Festival

jason@nashvilleshakes.org     (615) 255-2273