Improv for Democracy

How to Bridge Differences and Develop the Communication and Leadership Skills Our World Needs

Don Waisanen

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438481173
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While much has been written about what democracies should look like, much less has been said about how to actually train citizens in democratic perspectives and skills. Amid the social and political crises of our time, many programs seeking to bridge differences between citizens draw from the surprising field of improvisational theater. Improv trains people to engage with one another in ways that promote empathy and understanding. Don Waisanen demonstrates how improv-based teaching and training methods can forward the communication, leadership, and civic skills our world urgently needs. Waisanen includes specific exercises and thought experiments that can be used by educators; advocates for civic engagement and civil discourse; practitioners and scholars in communication, leadership, and conflict management; training and development specialists; administrators looking to build new curricula or programming; and professionals seeking to embed productive, sustainable, and socially responsible forms of interaction in and across organizations. Ultimately this book offers a new approach for helping people become more creative, heighten awareness, think faster, build confidence, operate flexibly, improve expression and governance skills, and above all, think and act more democratically.

Chapter 1

A New Curriculum for Training Engaged, Innovative, and Flexible Citizens

After earning top grades and graduating from an Ivy League university, Natalie found herself fired after only 13 months on her first job. Her academic training had prepared her well for many of life’s challenges, but she credited this first big professional failure to something missing in her education: a lack of training in people skills.1

Increasingly, we see that stories like Natalie’s aren’t unique. Schools teach a lot about following authority, learning technical knowledge, and taking tests—all important to do at times—but these don’t translate to workplace and societal skills such as listening well, reading a room, and adapting to diverse people’s needs.2 Even for the more social and less academically inclined, practice in a fuller range of people skills helpful to our work and personal lives remains underrepresented in many educational curricula.

This problem isn’t just a matter of opinion: a National Bureau for Economic Research report on “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market” recently concluded that “nearly all job growth since 1980 has been in occupations that are relatively social-skill intensive, while jobs that require high levels of analytical and mathematical reasoning, but low levels of social interaction, jobs that are comparatively easy to automate, have fared comparatively poorly.”3 When research from scholars such as Jean Twenge is added to this mix—that the most recent generation (iGen, born 1995–2012) are less skilled socially than any previous generation, with correlations between the advent of smart devices and anxiety in face-to-face social interactions—these findings are only compounded.4 These trends highlighting the importance of social skills show no signs of abating.

Like Natalie, I remember once yearning for something that might help turn so much theory into practice, especially in areas such as communication. For years I had read books, crammed for exams, and gone through the motions of a typical education. After I graduated from college, a mentor at the time told me something that has long remained on my mind: what most people need to add to their education is a “learning that occurs by the nervous system.”5 This is a type of high-level learning that seeks to get the very best ideas into the body, not just the head. And there’s more to it than just “getting experience.” After all, people can have a lot of experience practicing the wrong techniques, using unproductive behaviors, or simply never seeking to learn from their experiences.

Take public speaking, for example. There’s a lot of value in studying great public speakers and the many established techniques that can greatly increase the chances that a presentation will be effective. There can also be value in just getting up and practicing public speaking to get more comfortable with doing so. Yet in many areas like this, the best kind of learning engages both the mind and the body, alternating between important field-tested or evidence-based concepts and opportunities for guided feedback and practice that help the learning sink in deeply. No matter what level a public speaker is at, they will always stand to improve the most by learning about and practicing the art and science of speaking. It’s about getting on both the “balcony” (where you can get some reflective distance and a good view of what’s going on from a higher-level) and the “dance floor” (where you are fully involved in the experience).6

We’re in good company in thinking this way. From John Dewey forward, leading educators have argued that people, especially adults, learn best from real, immediate experiences, so an ongoing mission has been to find “a methodology that can teach further below the neck.”7 That’s the curriculum that this book engages, and it’s a curriculum that can be added to anyone’s thinking and toolkit.

For improv to improve democracy, we need to first understand how this new curriculum promotes a “learning that occurs by the nervous system,” where it comes from, and how it ties into and is supported by interdisciplinary work. Readers of all kinds can use the ideas in this chapter to make a case for the value and support that applied improv can bring to any curriculum. This chapter will establish the educational grounding for applied improv, show its connections with a broad range of thought and practice, and set a foundation for the specific competencies in communication, leadership, and civic skills covered in the rest of this book. I will draw on guidelines from improvisational theater only as they are applicable to professional contexts, translating where certain ideas have emerged, why they are important, and how they can be applied in teaching and training across many sectors. This chapter will also provide some initial exercises that readers can apply to see exactly how this new curriculum supports the development of engaged, innovative, and flexible citizens.

Changing How We Educate

Applied improv works with and challenges how we typically learn, addressing one of the biggest problems that educational and similar institutions currently face. I wouldn’t be the first to note that the way colleges and universities have always gone about their business has lately come up against tremendous pressures from within and without. From critiques that universities don’t place enough value on teaching to objections that many curricula remain irrelevant to students’ lives, the value of higher education has come under fire as never before.

Industries from newspapers to mail delivery to marketing have all undergone radical changes in the past several decades, and education will be no different.8 Linda Weiser Friedman, Hershey Friedman, and Martin Frankel highlight how an increase in work-related certificates, empirical research supporting the effectiveness of the flipped hybrid model (i.e., courses that mix both online and offline teaching), and converging opinion about some of the most in-demand educational competencies (communication, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, character, and curiosity) show that, “in a nutshell, what matters are skills, not degrees.”9 With almost all of young people involved in education, and nearly half of all adults engaging in some type of formal learning experience every year (classes, professional development workshops, certificate programs, etc.),10 at the very least, what’s become clear is that many longstanding models and habits of instruction need to change as the world around us shifts.

Several years ago Sir Ken Robinson gave a presentation that has become one of the most viewed and praised TED Talks of all time. In his speech “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”11 he argued that most of the world’s educational systems need to move beyond industrial workforce models and flatten their hierarchies (which prioritize subjects like math at the top) so that other subjects focusing on social skills and creativity might have more of an equal standing across curricula. In many places, the arts in particular have been eliminated from educational programming. Robinson underscored how joy, play, and laughter, long thought to be the enemies of “serious” instruction, should now be seen as a means of boosting and achieving educational and training goals. Susan Engel puts it this way: “Adults tend to talk about learning as if it were medicine: unpleasant, but necessary. Why not instead think of learning as if it were food—something so valuable to humans that they have evolved to experience it as a pleasure?”12 She argues that joy is the very foundation of education. Similarly, others underscore how in improv instruction, “we’re often fighting a real battle to help adults recover from having the desire to play—and, by extension, creativity—beaten out of them,” so they should be invited “to look at the world with the eyes you had before the world told you what you were supposed to see.”13

I’m a big proponent for the need to approach education seriously and improve instruction and learning in more technical disciplines, especially in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects where there’s substantial work to do in training our next generation of scientists, engineers, and more, especially in the US. But it’s also worth recognizing how Robinson struck a chord with a global audience because of the number of people who have experienced a lopsided education and limited opportunities for learning in creativity, communication, and similar areas.

Remarkably, the very same concerns motivated those who founded modern improvisational theater. Some of improv’s major figures in the last century felt impelled to innovate new methods for teaching because of what they had experienced and observed in the educational systems all around them. Schools all have socialization processes complete with rituals of competition over collaboration (e.g., for grades), authority over discovery (e.g., having a syllabus handed to you), and learning how to not show incompetence or make mistakes, among other issues.14 Keith Johnstone clued into these trends long ago, seeing improv training as a vehicle for countering some of the largest blind spots in formal education. Growing up in England, Johnstone noticed that a great deal of schooling in his younger years seemed monotonous, controlled, and designed to suppress spontaneity.15 Not all of life needs to be filled with spontaneity, of course, but when parts so central to the human experience such as play and dealing with the unexpected are so routinely excluded from entire institutions, Johnstone couldn’t help but feel that something was awry. In the end, he concluded that his education was making him less responsive to others and less mindful of the world around him.16

In the US, several figures identified the same problems and began experimenting with potential theater-based solutions to these issues. One of the founders of modern improv in Chicago, Viola Spolin, originally developed many of her exercises as ways to help refugee and immigrant children to overcome language, adaptation, and connection problems in their new country, while Neva Boyd applied them in military convalescent homes to help wounded veterans feel more confident upon leaving hospitals.17 From the very start, these figures saw improv as a way to make a difference in the lives of individuals and as crucial contributions to society. This work has been carried forward by academic institutions like the London School of Economics and Political Science, which more recently has been using improvisation to teach language skill development.18

Improv teachers note the strange turn many of us take at a certain point in our educations. While young children love to try new activities and generate new ideas, after a number of years we become adults who sit back, assess, and critique our creative abilities at every turn for fear of looking foolish or talentless, or simply failing.19 For too many people this translates to approaching learning opportunities with anxiety and tension at every turn.20 In countless trainings, I have entered a room full of adults to run an applied improv or related workshop where rigidity and fear run thick in the air. You can see it all over participants’ bodies and facial expressions, which broadcast, “I hope he doesn’t make me get out of my seat,” “I’m no good in front of people,” “I’m not creative,” and more. Fast-forward to a workshop with kids and it’s the opposite, with every child looking like we’ve just run through five exercises before we even start: “I want to go first,” “I can’t wait to jump in,” “This’ll be fun,” etc. One of my favorite parts of running an applied improv curriculum is seeing the protective layers adults learn to build around themselves gradually peel off after years of acting fearfully.

Given the pressures education now faces and the gaps it needs to fill, we need new tools and skills for how we educate. Many have woken up to this reality, but far too many participants still walk into classrooms or workshops that ask them to sit passively while instructors lecture from endless, bullet-point-filled slides. Lectures aren’t intrinsically bad, but when they become the only way of teaching and training, we’re setting the bar about as low as possible for inclusive and engaging learning processes. As we’ll explore further in this chapter, these methods also fly in the face of a great deal of evidence about the ways human beings best comprehend, remember, and apply anything.

Applied improv reverses a typical way of educating by having participants experience a concept being taught before intellectualizing about it. We know that seeing, feeling, and experien...