"Let's Do a Project on Richard!":
 
The experience of Kay Janis and Nina Fleming in teaching a unit on Richard III is remarkable chiefly for the way in which it became a collaboration among a number of organizations: their school, the Richard III Society, and their local library. At the time that Janis and Fleming decided to teach the course, the school's budget was seriously circumscribed and there were no funds to buy the textbooks they wanted. A group of members of the Richard III Society sent out a sort of "chain letter" to fellow members, asking for donations of used copies of Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time and Shakespeare's Richard III. Within a few weeks, Janis and Fleming had enough of both texts to plan their unit. The North Kingston (RI) public library was also a willing collaborator, ordering a reference collection of approximately 15 texts for student use. The librarians also invited the students to create a library exhibition, invited a speaker from Holy Cross College to address the Friends of the Library on the topic of Shakespeare's Richard III, and arranged for the students to be interviewed by the local newspaper. The images above this text show the cases of the library exhibition and the photo that accompanied the newspaper article. (The students got a first-hand experience with the difficulties of relying on printed sources when several of them were misquoted in the newspaper.) 
 |