The Tempest/A Tempest

These resources allow for an intertextual investigation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest. Césaire, a playwright from Martinique, first presented this 1969 adaptation in Tunisia. The play calls to light the inherent colonialist undertones and context of Shakespeare’s original while addressing its contemporary post-colonial world and alluding to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

The resources for this unit include:

• Several discussion and/or writing prompts for each act of The Tempest
• An activity to engage with post-colonial literary theory to transition from the original play to the adaptation
• An IB Language and Literature Individual Oral assessment using A Tempest and 3 options for non-literary texts

Teaching Resources

A note about the resources

Online-Friendly
This unit was initially conducted online. For each act of The Tempest, students submitted a response to one of the prompts provided. Students were asked to record 2 verbal responses, write 2 responses, and could choose which format to use for the final response. As such, students continued to develop their verbal and written articulation in anticipation of the final assessment for this unit (the IO) and our final Year 1 exam, which was a Paper 2. However, these prompts could easily be used for virtual discussion threads, Socratic seminar prompts, or other forms of group discussion.

Rubric
The rubric used for the final assessment was the IB Language and Literature Individual Oral rubric.

IO Approach
As a way of not using up too many “passages” from a non-literary work, students did not study an entire non-literary body of work for this assignment. Rather, they either listened to one podcast episode, read one rich essay, or read one lengthy article. The expectation was that they select a 40 line extract but also speak to the entire text. This of course does not fully mimic the demands of the real IB Individual Oral as not as much knowledge and understanding of an entire work is required, but it does do a fine job of teaching students how to balance their investigation of how the global issue is presented in the “work” and chosen extract. Of course, for their discussion of A Tempest, they were expected to discuss the play as a whole.

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