Heyo wanna hear about the PLP 10 humanities project that I did last semester? Well you’re in luck because this is a blog post just about that. What is the topic you may ask? Its a doozie for sure. For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
The Project
So obviously if we’re doing a project on Romeo and juliet, we need to actually know what story we are talking about. To help us understand the concepts and themes discussed in the sometimes hard-to-understand world of Shakespeare, we created a theme book to identify a topic within an act, include evidence as quotes from the text to support the topic, and connect that theme to one of the film adaptations we watched in class (I’ll talk about that last part later). We did this knowledge tracking twice for every act, so 10 different quotes and entries in total. As we read aloud certain scenes from every act, readers theatre style, we would make note of any quotes that we felt represented common topics in Romeo and Juliet such as; The Nature of Free Will, Honour and Obligation, The Naivety of Youth, The Power of Love and Hate, Violence and Death, Gender Roles, Revenge, and The Multiplicity of Identity. We would then write about how we thought Shakespeare was trying to convey that theme in the scene.
My themebook
The Product + Driving Question
How has William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling?
So remember when I previously mentioned connecting identified themes to film adaptations that we watched, and then I said I would talk about that later. Well this is later because the best answer to the driving question is the film adaptations we reviewed and lead us to create our own. Yes we actually watched movies as schoolwork and were encouraged to watch more movies as homework. The films all were somewhat based or modelled off of Romeo and juliet (hence why we refer to them as film adaptations). My group re-enacted the balcony scene for our video, with myself playing Romeo and Ines playing Juliet. We chose to film it in a pseudo-Maury Povich/The Office/reality tv style with a hint of Taylor Swift. It was really fun to create and I think the final product is pretty good. So here it is!
Conclusion
Overall, this project was really fun and I actually really loved learning about Shakespeare and his magnificent play, Romeo and Juliet. I also enjoyed being able to read aloud in class and gain confidence on video. I think I did good. Thanks for reading!!!!
As Always, Brooke.