I’ve written before about the final project I assigned to my students for this term’s ENGL1102: Shakespeare’s English Histories course. The assignment was an ambitious experiment to see how students would collaborate on a digital edition of the Queen’s Men play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. I haven’t yet assessed the students’ final artifacts, and before I see the results I thought I would take a moment to practice a form of self-evaluation and write some observations about what I’ve seen work and what I would do differently if I were to include a similar project in a future course.
The assignment objective was to teach students about the editorial process and test my hypothesis that scaffolded assignments with final group components strengthen the learning experience. Everything we’ve done this term has, in one way or another, built toward this assignment. Assignment components included rough and revised transcriptions of the 1598 facsimile edition with word definitions and glosses, contextual research projects pertaining to the medieval subject matter, its importance to Elizabethan culture and politics, and the relationship of the play to Shakespeare’s subsequent Henriad.
