From Verona to Ramallah: Living in a State of Emergency

Abstract

I have spent much of the last two years working in a school in Ramallah, Palestine, supporting new teachers of English. I worked in the classroom, in partnership, sharing the planning and teaching of lessons. This essay is about exploring what happens to texts in a specific classroom context, about how a particularly English text, Romeo and Juliet, was interrogated and remade by young people in a class I taught with Victoria, a young American in her first year of teaching, and about how the study of this fictive text enabled them to explore fundamental questions of identity and difference. Victoria and I, foreigners in Palestine, taught English and shared a common language with the students. This, and the technology available to us, might seem to promise easy communication but this is an illusion, for these things cannot transcend the differences between us – differences that are part of the human condition and have to be acknowledged and embraced if there is to be any meaningful dialogue between us. The essay is therefore also an exploration of the possibilities for communication between us, largely through the literature we read and about the insights we provide for each other in the course of our talk and activities about the text.

Keywords:

• identity
• learning
• difference
• meaning-making
• communicating
• Shakespeare
• role-play

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Students’ and teachers’ names have been changed to culturally appropriate pseudonyms.

2. Since early mobile phones did not have Arabic script, users developed a way of texting phonetically, using Roman script with number substitutions for extra letters.

3. People under 45 years of age have to go through the checkpoint on foot.

4. It should be noted that these were statements from the newspaper report and do not reflect the views of anyone involved in the production.