Years ago, my old writing friend Bruce Holland Rogers mentioned a book to me called Impro by Keith Johnstone. It's a book about improvisational theater, but Bruce said it really taught him a lot about the creative process as a writer. I've finally gotten around to reading this book, and it's just wonderful -- chock full of insights into spontaneous creativity, while remaining just philosophical enough to be called theory. It's really helping me think about exercises for my writing workshops, and even sparking a lot of new ideas for my own writing, because Johnstone really succeeds at prompting the reader into a creative mindset. But I'm also reading it from the viewpoint of an educator and I think it has a lot to say about the art of teaching -- particularly in the teaching of the arts. Indeed, Johnstone writes from the perspective of a drama teacher (or coach), sharing his techniques and the motives behind it. But it's useful for more than just thespian teachers -- the bulk of the book is about prompting people into thinking on their own and he incorporates many anecdotes about his life in school, as both student and teacher.
The book is a quick read, but I'm going to re-read it carefully and process some of my thoughts on each chapter here on Pedablogue (as I did awhile ago with my discussion of Ernst Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered).
On Johnstone, Keith. IMPRO: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Routledge, 1981.
CHAPTER ONE: NOTES ON MYSELF
In the opening autobiographical chapter to Impro, "Notes on Myself," Johnstone explains his resistance to traditional schooling techniques and orthodox theatrical performance. He talks about how habituation dulls the senses and diminishes our sense of perception of the world around us. In recounting his experiences in the British school system, and later as a teacher himself, he explains that traditional schooling is mostly to blame for turning an otherwise colorful reality gray, because it insists on compartmentalizing the world into informational units, rather than grooming students' innate talent and helping them to really perceive and understand the world around them by attending to phenomena.
This idea of "attending" to the phenomena of reality -- which we might otherwise understand as the skill of "concentration" -- is vitally important to Johnstone because paying attention to reality brings the world to life, and this, in his view, is what the aim of artistic learning should be:
...it was largely my interest in art that had destroyed any life in the world around me. [Through schooling in the arts] I'd learned perspective, and about balance, and composition. It was as if I'd learned to redesign everything, to reshape it so that I saw what ought to be there, which of course is much inferior to what is there. The dullness was not an inevitable consequence of age, but of education. (14)
For Johnstone, education is not a "substance" (where bad teachers supply too little of it and good teachers supply a lot), but rather a "process" -- an activity. In his view a "bad teacher" is one whose process is destructive, "wrecking talent," by inculcating students with a fear of failure (16-7).
Johnstone tells some wonderful anecdotes about the few teachers in his life who awoke his creativity and, later, influenced his teaching. Given a batch of students who no one else wanted to teach, he realized that it wasn't the students who were "ineducable" -- it was that the traditional methods of schooling weren't working because they squelched creativity (22). He sought to release the innate passion these students had by prompting them to not think of themselves as "being educated." He adopted a stance of "non-interference" that could generate the enthusiasm for life the school children had as children.
Indeed, one assumption built into Johnstone's pedagogy is that good teachers enable students to release their "inner child," who is spontaneous and playful rather than repressed and too dependent on the "adults" of the educational system for permission to think for themselves. After years of struggling in school, he eventually found himself in the position of schoolteacher, and Johnstone "began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children" (25). He tells a great story about an art class where his most important teacher asked the students to do preposterous things with paint...like an assignment to "imagine a clown on a one-wheeled bicycle who pedals through the [black] paint, and on to our sheets of paper. 'Don't paint the clown,' he [says], 'paint the mark he leaves on your paper" (18). Johnstone struggled with trying to figure out what to do: how to get it right, demonstrate his skill, and impress the teacher. The teacher then asked them to find patterns and fill them in with "nice colours, nasty colours, whatever you like." Johstone was flummoxed. After they finished, the teacher showed the students the results of the same assignment from another class. Johnstone marvels at how excellent these examples are, assuming they're done by an advanced class, but then the teacher reveals that they were created by eighth graders who were given the same exact guidelines. The kids instinctively knew what to do -- to follow their intuition rather than try to "get it right" for the teacher. He concludes that one of the major blockages for him was that his education had destroyed him into a state of dependency and fear, rather than freedom. This became a model for Johnstone's own teaching in the improvisational arts. He learned from his mentor that "the art was 'in' the child, and that it wasn't something to be imposed by the adult," and, moreover that "the student should never experience failure. The teacher's skill lay in presenting experience in such a way that the student was bound to succeed" (20).
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Obviously, Johnstone advocates radical pedagogy that works against the conforming and socializing impulses of most educational programs. To suggest that a "student should never experience failure" is contrary to any normative system of letter grading, where "F's" abound. But he's right, I think, when it comes tackling the problem of the uncreative, unmotivated student: if you can get them over their fears, particularly their fears of failure, then you can often unleash the creative expression that's latent within them. Writer's block, for example, often has it's roots in fears of failing to please, failing to finish, failing to capture the felt idea perfectly on the page. Victoria Nelson's book, On Writer's Block, shares quite a bit with Johnstone's in suggesting that one way to overcome these fears is to unleash the so-called "inner child" who has no fear but only curiosity, spontaneity, wonder, and the ability to "attend" to phenomena, working without a net handed to them by the educational system. Writers and artists who succeed at this are able to attract an audience because they are able to appeal to draw the audience's "attention" to the text and initiate a parallel sense of wonder, curiosity, etc. While I'm as hesitant to accept the idea of the "inner child" as much as I am unable to reject the grading system I have to operate within as a teacher, Johnstone's point about failure reminds me of a key point: that failure is a social construct which we integrate into our personalities, which inevitably leads to conflicts and blockages to expression and learning. For writers like Johnstone and Nelson, moreover, the talent of the child is often marshaled as a metaphor for the impulses of the unconscious, which -- like art -- processes reality in a different but true way than the pre-processed world given to us by the education system. By attempting to construct an alternative learning environment where traditional notions of failure are "bracketed off," the instructor can help students take creative risks and exercise creative freedom.
There is a telling moment in this chapter, where Johnstone reveals one method by which he constructs the classroom to help liberate students from their fear of failure:
The first thing I do when I meet a group of new students is to sit on the floor. I play low status, and I'll explain that if the students fail they're to blame me. Then they laugh, and relax, and I explain that really it's obvious that they should blame me, since I'm supposed to be the expert; and if I give them the wrong material, they'll fail; and if I give them the right material, then they'll succeed. I play low status physically but my actual status is going up, since only a very confident and experienced person would put the blame for failure on himself. At this point they almost certainly start sliding off their chairs, because they don't want to be higher than me. I have already changed the group profoundly because failure is suddenly not so frightening any more. (31)
Once he gets students and teacher on "the same level" then it all becomes "just playing" -- including the see-sawing performance of high and low status in the exchanges the teacher has with students: "...they just do what they're asked to, and see what happens. It's this decision not to try and control the future which allows students to be spontaneous" (32). To "see what happens" is to take a creative risk, win or lose. That freedom lies at the heart of creative self-expression. But it's also interesting that Johnstone himself takes a creative risk as a teacher, subordinating (and at times depricating) himself to the students, while, ostensibly, still retaining his status as an intellectual leader who has earned -- and is earning -- the right to that status. Johnstone's clever "game" with the students is -- remarkably -- a status game, which inherently treats the teacher and the student as a role that is played in a sort of social theater. Although Johnstone is literally emphasizing the theatrical performance for play actors, this concept lies at the crux of Johnstone's teaching strategy as discussed in the next chapter, "Status."
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