Creativity and Improvised Educations

Case Studies for Understanding Impact and Implications

Michael Hanchett Hanson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367859480
• eBook ISBN: 9781000377293
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Examining the improvised relationships among lifelong learning, formal education, and creativity, this volume provides detailed case studies of the creative work of people from a wide variety of fields. Each profile allows readers to explore how real people's distinctive points of view, senses of purpose, and ultimate contributions developed through participation in complex worlds. By looking at creativity as a distributed and participatory process, these cases deconstruct the myth of solitary creative genius, while exploring applications of complexity theory to creative work and raising new questions for creativity research. Providing a framework for thinking about education, agency, and change, this book is valuable for both students and researchers seeking concrete ways to broaden their understanding of creativity in practice.

1
Participating through Theater

Our Starting Point

There are multiple schools of improvisation, but any actor who studies improvisation seriously is likely to read Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (Impro), by Keith Johnstone, at some point. The book, published in 1979, is a meditation on life as well as on theater. Beyond a set of rules for actors, Impro outlines theories of human interaction, spontaneity, narrative form, the unconscious, and the authentic self. In the process, Johnstone has critiqued some important aspects of traditional creativity theory.

Creativity researchers have, in turn, explored improvisation generally, and Johnstone specifically. The applications have ranged from improvisational techniques in educational settings to corporate training to personal development.¹

Inspired by the breadth of these applications, we became curious about how improvisation can apply to our understanding of individuals doing long-term creative work. Do the specific structures and techniques used in improvisational theater fit with participatory analyses of complex systems?

Johnstone, thus, lays a foundation for our exploration in the later cases. We start with his own improvisation in developing a set of techniques for improvisation.

Note: facts concerning Johnstone’s life and work come from his own writings and the scholarship of his biographer, Theresa Robbins Dudeck, including her direct assistance in answering questions and giving us her insights concerning this case.

Keith Johnstone: The Education of Improvisation

A: Augh!

B: Whatever is it, man?

A: It’s my leg, Doctor.

B: This looks nasty. I shall have to amputate.

A: It’s the one you amputated last time, Doctor.

B: You mean you’ve got a pain in your wooden leg?

A: Yes, Doctor.

B: You know what this means?

A: Not woodworm, Doctor!

B: Yes. We’ll have to remove it before it spreads to the rest of you.

(A’s chair collapses.)

B: My God! It’s spreading to the furniture!²

This kind of scene is familiar to almost everyone today as improvisational theater.

With no script, the actors play spontaneously off one another, producing skits or longer works that delight audiences. It’s like magic. But it is not. The spontaneity of improvisational theater comes from training and follows rules that reflect larger theoretical frameworks.

Education and Teaching

Johnstone’s Early Education and Its Later Uses

Johnstone was born in 1933 to a lower middle-class family in Brixham on the Southern coast of England.³ He said he remembered experiencing the world very intensely as a child – its colors, sounds, and environments.⁴ In his early years, he had teachers who encouraged his potential in art and reading. In fact, he was ahead for his age, being able to read from a newspaper while still in pre-school and being able to play the piano and read sheet music by age six.⁵ He also declared, early on, that he wanted to be a writer.⁶

At age seven, Johnstone was moved further inland, from Brixham to Glastonbury, to live with his grandparents as the fighting in World War II escalated. The young Johnstone found his new school in Glastonbury both unreasonably harsh and confusing.⁷ Fearful of being reprimanded, and unsure of the standards, he recalled being afraid of responding to assignments in the wrong way but then won a prize for producing the best work. In this perplexing environment, Johnstone began developing a “contrarian attitude”⁸ – when teachers said that some behavior was wrong, he tried to imagine in what ways that same behavior might be right.

At age 11, he returned to Brixham and scored highly on two school entrance exams, making him eligible to join the advanced stream of students. His academic performance, however, slipped once he began and remained poor for the next seven years. He was not happy. He developed a speech impediment and bad posture. He struggled to maintain his imagination and lost his fluency in writing.⁹ Overall, he remembered his schools expecting him to demonstrate “intelligence,”¹⁰ while not addressing his true interests. Johnstone also observed that, like him, the students he knew got through education by putting on armor. But he actually wanted to be as human as possible – exploring his imagination, not just developing his intellect.¹¹

Unable to find what he wanted in school, he became an autodidact, seeking out resources and teaching himself. His particular interests were literature, mythology, philosophy, and psychology. By age 12, he had read the Bhagavad Gita, The Epic of Gilgamesh, a number of Freud’s works,¹² and books about Greek mythology. He also learned about both eastern and western traditions of religiou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Uncertain Times
• Chapter 1: Participating through Theater
• Chapter 2: Participating through Neurology
• Chapter 3: Participating through Cuisine
• Chapter 4: Participating through Knitting
• Chapter 5: Participating through Revolution: Mao
• Chapter 6: Participating through Revolution: Dewantara
• Conclusion
• Writing Team
• Index