Shakespeare, Service Learning, and the Embattled Humanities

This chapter provides an evolving model for uniting educational practices often believed to be quite remote: service learning and literary analysis. Although one mode ostensibly attends to utility while the other dwells in academic abstraction, pursuing both in tandem reveals more shared interpretive practices than one might expect. Hillary Eklund argues that “when we free ourselves from the burden of proving the relevance of Shakespeare,” and instead create frameworks that collate classroom and community learning, we “heighten both the intellectual and civic stakes of our teaching.” Key to this model is a process that compares “problem-solving frameworks” as a way to foreground metacognition and self-reflection.