Talking Back to Shakespeare in a South African Lecture-room: Engaging in Critical Conversations about Resistance

In this paper, I reflect on a series of lectures, underpinned by the principles of critical pedagogy, when engaging with Shakespeare's The Tempest. Working with student teachers in a South African School of Education, I used a talk-back design to enable students to talk back to the canon and open the dialogue about resistance. I used hot seating, teacher-in-role and written work and found that students were able to set the agenda for interrogating and resisting forms of knowledge usually deemed worthy. I understood that using a dialogic platform enabled the students to identify different forms of knowledge and it allowed them to understand that all texts are socially constructed, are of a time, reflect an agenda, and need to be interrogated and resisted, if necessary. I found the talk-back design important in enabling democratic participation as students designed their own counter-discursive responses as they confronted the canonical imperatives.