Improvisational Teaching as Mode of Knowing

Introduction

Theatrical improvisation is a joyful, creative, and playful activity of discovery and a spontaneous process. It seems to be the opposite of teaching, which requires proper planning and advance thinking and seems a very “serious business” that deals with values and knowledge. Improvisation is shaped by flexibility and by transformative and equal relations among the participants. In contrast, there is in education usually a very clear hierarchy of teacher and pupils, and the relationships are mostly managed in a one-way direction. This seemingly reasonable comparison of opposites can be continued and developed. If we look beyond these superficial, stereotypical, and binary images of improvisation and teaching, however, we may notice the implicit connection between them, or at least the possibility of the technique of theatrical improvisation to contribute its expertise to teaching. Not everything that happens in the classroom is planned to the last detail; teachers, even if they have a detailed lecture “on paper,” find themselves improvising to contend with the vital flow of the lesson, which can be called an “educational event.” This improvisation in the classroom with unplanned events occurring is not an easy task. In this essay I try to describe improvisation as a practical device and mode of knowing for improving teaching.

One of the central complexities and challenges in training educators is how to teach them to contend with surprising and unexpected situations that frequently take place in the classroom. Occasionally these situations are defined as problems or disturbances because they do not appear in the teacher’s original plan. These situations can arise from events ranging from inappropriate behavior in the class to a pupil’s brilliant comment or question that the teacher was not anticipating and that can make him/her uncomfortable. In other words, how is it possible to develop the teacher’s reflective expertise? I argue that one of the ways to contend with this complicated problem is to use techniques of theatrical improvisation, as well as modes of knowing originally intended to deal with unanticipated situations in the creative process of theater art. The principles of improvisation technique can be implemented in the classroom by the teacher as a reflective mode in order to enhance the flexibility of the teacher’s reactions to spontaneous occurrences in the classroom. I explain and present this with a case that is taken from my experience as teacher educator in the theater-dance educators’ program of the Dance Arts School in the Kibbutzim College of Education, Tel Aviv, Israel.

First, however, I conceptualize my theoretical framework, which is based on the concepts of aesthetic and theatrical knowledge and theatrical events. Second, I elaborate on theatrical improvisation and its principles. In the last part of this essay, I present the case of a student who taught a movement and drama lesson using, in her teaching, principles of improvisation to manage unexpected situations that took place in the classroom.

Aesthetic and Theatrical Knowledge and Theatrical Event

The artist and scholar of education Eliot Eisner argues that “the roads to knowing are many”¹ and that aesthetics is one of them. The aesthetic, as a modulating form, is not restricted to the fine arts but is also present in all kinds of human formative activity as modes of knowing. All activity has a form that inherently designs its content and meaning, thus to know something is an activity that interweaves form and content. The way that something is formed influences the mode through which we construct knowledge about it. Eisner asks “what can education learn from the arts about the practice of education?”² and he provides six points as principles or characteristics of the arts and “translates” them into modes of knowing and guidelines for teaching and learning in the classroom. His second mode is relevant to our discussion. In the process of creation, there is no separation between planning and performing; it is one process in which both steps influence each other. A flexible nonlinear process is essential to creation: “As experienced teachers well know, the surest road to hell in a classroom is to stick to the lesson...