From Page to Virtual Stage: Students Step Into Shakespeare Using VR
What happens when students can step into a Shakespearean scene instead of only reading or watching it?
That question guided a Fall 2025 Teaching with Technology Partnership. Conceptualized by Kelly Duquette Williams, Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, the project provided the opportunity to observe students using virtual reality (VR) in a course centered on multimodal communication and Shakespeare. What we saw was immediate and unmistakable. VR didn’t just capture students attention; it changed how they talked about rhetoric.
Left to right: Ameya Sawadkar, Meryem Yilmaz Soylu, Kelly Duquette Williams, and Allison Valk.
About the Project
This was a four-day immersive learning journey was led by Kelly Duquette Williams and facilitated by Meryem Yılmaz Soylu from the Center for 21st Century Universities, Alison Valk from the Georgia Tech Library, and myself; this intentionally collaborative team allowed us to combine instructional goals, learning design support, and practical implementation.
The Goal
We wanted students to use virtual reality as a creative studio to adapt and produce short Shakespearean scenes – two to three minute long compressed versions designed for clarity, impact, and audience understanding.
The Process
Over four days, students moved through a purposeful progression. First came orientation: time to get familiar with the headset and controls, and to reduce technology-related friction that could distract from learning. Then came preparation and rehearsal: students drafted their scenes, tested how lines landed in a virtual environment, and learned that pacing and blocking feel different when your stage has no physical boundaries.
The students made choices theatre students make all the time – only now those choices were filtered through a new medium. They selected avatars suitable for tone and character, experimented with movement and gestures, and adjusted spatial relationships.
Over the four days, students became comfortable with the equipment and the unfamiliar (and sometimes awkward) realities of performing in a virtual space.
What Happened?
Students rehearse wearing VR headsets.
Students were visibly engaged. They learned how setting, movement, proximity, and perspective shape meaning. The VR experience’s combination of visual space, embodied movement, and presence helped students grasp rhetoric as something lived and experienced, not only analyzed in text format. VR was more than an exciting add-on; it became the setting for students to plan, create, and communicate.
We saw a learning experience that made rhetoric tangible. Students began to articulate how their creative decisions influence audience understanding. They developed a clearer sense of what immersive environments do well: offering flexibility, encouraging experimentation, and creating a kind of engagement hard to replicate in a traditional classroom setting. Just as importantly, they learned where VR has limits. Compared to live theatre, students noticed conveying emotional nuance can be more difficult in a virtual performance – facial expressions, micro-gestures, and subtle voice-to-body alignment are harder to communicate through avatars and controllers. The contrast gave students language to compare modalities and think critically about medium, meaning, and audience.
Duquette Williams works with a group of students in VR headsets.
From my perspective, this project reinforced something we care about deeply at the Center for Teaching and Learning: technology leads to transformative learning when it is integrated with clear learning goals, thoughtful scaffolding, and time for iteration. VR was not effective because it was “cool.” It was effective because students were asked to repeatedly create, test, and reflect inside the medium.
What’s Next?
We’re excited to keep sharing insights from this work, build new collaborations, and continue exploring innovative ways to support student learning through tools like VR – grounded in pedagogy, evidence, and real constraints faced by instructors and students. The more we treat emerging technologies as teachable environments rather than isolated experiences, the more potential we unlock for engagement and deeper learning.
