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  • Clytemnestra at the Mall: A Plea for More Improvisational Pedagogy in the Arts
  • Ellen Handler Spitz (bio)

A work of art no matter how old and classic is actually, not just potentially, a work of art only when it lives in some individualized experience. . . . It cannot be asserted too strongly that what is not immediate is not aesthetic.

—John Dewey, Art as Experience

Let’s imagine a young professor who receives a poor review of her teaching because she fails, when observed, to complete what she had initially set out to accomplish in the specific class meeting under critique. Assessment, after all, does imply—when taken literally—being judged on what one has set out to do. Why did she fail? Her art history students, mesmerized by Van Gogh’s hypnotic final masterpiece “Crows over Cornfield,” had, after their initial reticence, gradually become so highly vocal and passionately engaged that she found herself unwilling to cut off their (and her own) interpretative colloquy in order to “move on” according to her previously stated plan. I write to support her decision and to advocate for her on-the-spot choice to stay with the painting and with the cresting mood it engendered and to ride it out, even though to do so meant sacrificing other potentially compelling material. In fact, I would argue that this young teacher in the arts did not fail. She succeeded at something far more significant if less tangible and quantifiable than screening a set number of images in an appointed hour. She practiced a form of “improvisational pedagogy” to which we should cry Brava! Sudden creative shifts of this sort deserve to thrive in university classrooms that involve the arts, and they merit our praise. In fact, the abandonment of previous plans in response to unforeseen phenomena may prove far more challenging than sticking doggedly to what was preconceived; it requires resources of both temperament and knowledge, and it may lead to quite unexpected, even brilliant results. [End Page 33]

What I mean by “improvisational pedagogy” entails a notion of education as forming and reinforcing connections—connections that can never be fully orchestrated in advance. It is teaching that situates itself in the present and resonates with the here and now. Grounded in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and in the illuminating pragmatism and constructivism of John Dewey, it is a mode that seeks to inspire, generate, and enchant into being. It sprinkles ideas—or images or musical notes—into the atmosphere and grants them the time to settle, to take root, and to spring up under the beneficent sorcery of professor-magicians who work their wizardry in wondrous alchemical laboratories known as seminar rooms, studios, and lecture halls. Improvisational pedagogy means teaching with extended cadenzas. Just imagine, if you are auditorily inclined, the thrilling crescendos of musical sound that might swell under the batons of a variety of talented conductors who are interpreting the imprecise allegro appassionato on the same score.

Having benefited from an education of privilege, hoary with tradition, oaken, ivied, gloved in velour, soft-spoken, yet weighted down by the stones of its own gravitas, I endeavor these days to practice a species of improvisational pedagogy. Thoughtful readers may protest: Well, but if regimens of painstakingly prepared teaching and learning formed you intellectually in your youth, why swerve from them now? Why turn your back on a combination of methods, plans, and schedules that served you well?

My answer has little to do with history and its changing facts and conditions (as in tempora mutantur et nos mutamus in eis). Nor does it spring from a need to topple hierarchies so as to redistribute power in the classroom, nor even from a politically correct mandate to hear “other voices”—in other words, from a notion of pedagogical reform as a mode of political activism. Any of these reasons might be persuasively advanced. For me, however, improvisational pedagogy has to do with the notion that university teaching in the arts is eo ipso an adventure. Passion for it comes from an unquenchable desire to take artistic and intellectual risks: to be fully alive, “on all cylinders,” as the saying goes, in the classroom...

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