Improvising Toward Vitality Through Teaching: Considering Hull House, Teacher Education, and English Language Arts

Abstract

This three-paper dissertation explores the teaching of dramatic improvisation (“improv”)—either improv itself, or improv integrated with other instructional goals—in three different contexts: in an after-school program at Jane Addams’ Hull House, in a Master’s-level teacher education course, and in a ninth-grade English Language Arts class of multilingual newcomer immigrant students. Through an interpretive historical analysis, the first paper presents the ways that social worker and theater educator Viola Spolin taught improv in her Creative Recreational Theatre program as a form of social group work: by employing democratic teaching methods, emphasizing shared recreational experiences, and eliciting the participation of local communities. These findings provide an important re-contextualization of Spolin’s work in relation to her original instructional desires and intentions, and locates her improv pedagogy with respect to its original context and participants. The second paper presents findings from an autoethnographic study of the author’s experiences co-teaching the University teacher education course “Improvisational Teaching” with professional theatrical improvisers. Through a form of analysis attentive to the affective experiences of a group, I (the author) trace the experiences of two focal student participants of moving towards and away from a sense of greater attunement with respect to the classroom group, and my own felt experiences in relation. This work expands upon the growing line of research exploring affective and embodied experiences in teacher education by presenting findings concerning the ways members of teacher education course came to feel more or less connected to the group in real time. The third paper reports upon my experiences of instructing three classroom groups of multilingual students classified as English Learners through an innovative pedagogical approach that leveraged improv activities towards English Language Arts (ELA) learning objectives in a public high school. I report upon the ways that my theorizing and pedagogy shifted over the course of the year while seeking to adaptively affirm and respond in-the-moment to students’ shifting expressions of energetic intensity.