Going Performative in Intercultural Education

International Contexts, Theoretical Perspectives and Models of Practice

John Crutchfield, Manfred Schewe, John Crutchfield, Manfred Schewe

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783098545
• eBook ISBN: 9781783098569
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Bildungspolitik

Over the last two decades drama pedagogy has helped to lay the foundations for a new teaching and learning culture, one that accentuates physicality and centres on performative experience. Signs of this 'performative turn' in education are especially strong in the field of foreign/second language teaching. This volume introduces scholars, language teachers, student teachers and drama practitioners to the concept of a performative foreign language didactics. Approaching the subject from a wide variety of contexts, the contributors explore the extent to which performative approaches, emphasising the role of the body as a learning medium, can achieve deep intercultural learning. Drama activities such as improvisation, hot seating and tableaux are shown to create rich opportunities for intercultural encounters that transport studentsbeyond the parameters of conventional language, literature and culture education.

Part 1

First Impressions

1The Intercultural Surprise: Teaching Improvisational Theatre in Different Cultural Contexts

Magdalena Haftner and Alexander Riedmüller

Introduction

Was it one or two kisses on the cheek we were supposed to give the participants before the workshop in the Argentinean province of San Juan? And do we have to repeat this protocol afterwards? Should we shake hands with our students in Yekaterinburg, or do Russians not expect that? Is it acceptable for me as an Austrian-born theater and language teacher, that for the second time in this class, when one of the students starts to improvise a scene, the German character has a blond beard and drinks too much beer? And should we encourage the scene in which the Austrian woman is always well-organized and tidying up in contrast to her Indian colleagues?

Questions like these have accompanied us, the German-speaking improv group artig, over the past years of teaching and performing in many places around the world. The group was founded in Vienna, Austria, in 2009 by four former students of diverse academic disciplines: Magdalena Haftner (Educational Studies, Theatre Pedagogy, Physical and Devising Theatre), Lino Kleingarn (Theatre, Film and Media Studies), Anne-Marie Kuhfuß (Romance Studies and German as a Foreign Language) and Alexander Riedmüller (Music and Movement Education/Rhythmics). After finishing our studies, and after some years of experimentation in stage projects with different types of improvisational theater, we started to use the knowledge of our respective professional fields to develop a strategy linking improv theater to German language training and education. We called this program ‘spielend deutsch’ which in German has the double meaning of ‘acting in German’ and ‘easy, playful German’. During the past five years of improvisation and language teaching in more than 20 countries – in places like Buenos Aires (Argentina), Yekaterinburg (Russia), Chennai (India), Teheran (Iran), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) or Portland (USA), to name a few – we have had a large number of intercultural encounters. Because our group teaches German language abroad, our work is mainly based on intercultural contact between the culture of the place we are visiting and the cultures of the German-speaking countries, Austria, Germany and Switzerland, from which we ourselves come.

Teaching through improv theater is almost synonymous with a spontaneous way of leading a group. This requires special preparation for the teacher, even more so in an intercultural context. How does one deal with the clichés about the German-speaking world or about the students’ home countries? When and how does one correct the students in improvisational and language learning issues? In teaching improv, it is of fundamental importance that the teacher creates a safe environment to allow free associative acting. This can be achieved, for example, by playing with status while teaching, and in this way dismantling a hierarchical structure, especially in countries where this kind of relationship is common between students and teachers. Other questions continually confronting the members of artig include: How much physical contact is appropriate or even expected? How does body language allow for a different (inter)cultural layer of communication and a different relationship between pedagogue and pupils?

As one can probably imagine, the group has a great deal to tell about their experiences over the past years of itinerant teaching and acting around the globe. In this chapter, we give a short insight into our practice and the intercultural surprises we have experienced.

Improvisational Theater

The methodological foundation of the workshops given by artig is improvisational theater. Before moving on to concrete examples from the workshops, it is important to give a short overview of improv theater in general, its pedagogical approach (based upon the work of Keith Johnstone), its potential in the context of foreign language learning and its method for dealing with stereotypes and clichés so as to enable good storytelling.

Let us swim and sink together! How improv works on stage and the basics of its pedagogical approach

Improvisation is a form of live theater, in which the plot, characters and dialogue of a certain game, scene or story are made up spontaneously by the actors on stage. Often, improvisers request a suggestion from the audience, or draw on some other source of inspiration to get started, so the performance also has an interactive component. It is thus a non-scripted theater form, in which the actors must possess a high degree of flexibility and cooperation. They have to work together to define the actions and parameters of a scene. In short, it is as a process of co-creation that occurs live on stage and right in front of the audience. Besides its artistic value, improvisation training has a high pedagogical impact, as we will illustrate in what follows.

The contemporary understanding of improvisational theater was strongly influenced by Keith Johnstone. His concern as a teacher and later as a theater director, playwright and author, was to awaken the imagination and spontaneity in his students by developing exercises and strategies that are intended to take away their fear of failure and of making mistakes. In this approach, it is fundamental to connect the students with their own imagination in a playful way. Johnstone understands the job of the teacher as giving support to students in creative processes. In this imaginative play, they liberate their learning processes without the fear of failing (Johnstone, 2006a: 46). Accordingly, a good teacher never lets his/her students experience disappointing or discouraging failure, but makes them understand that failure is a necessary part of the learning process, which facilitates positive results by finding ways to overcome it and including it in the learning process (Johnstone, 2006a: 26). The moment of struggle should not lead to an experience of being unable to do something, but to recognizing it, being kind to oneself and finding another way of solving the task. Johnstone (2013) says: ‘You can’t learn without failing so we should welcome failure and laugh because we are on the right track’. Elsewhere, he refers to his art teacher, a man named Stirling, who suggests that if a child has trouble drawing a tree, the child should be permitted to go outside, touch it, feel it or try to model it in clay instead (Johnstone, 2015: 20). We assume that one of the most important principles of learning is pleasure, pleasure of experimenting. Experiments always include failure: it is part of the process of discovery with the tools one can use in the present moment. The teacher’s task is to create spaces where the student feels safe and to allow him/her to experiment, to associate, to improvise – to learn.

For this reason, Johnstone developed exercises and games intended for the players to feel safe on stage. By not succumbing to the pressure of having to plan ahead how the scene will end, they can engage straight away and act freely. Likewise, positivity offers the key point for the progression of scenes. This means that the actor tries to pick up any type of scenic or spoken expressions without evaluating them in a negative way, as this is called ‘blocking’ in improvisational theater terms. Furthermore, Johnstone encourages the participants to offer and accept both their own ideas and ideas from their partner(s) on stage. The elements Johnstone (2006b: 174) calls ‘game offers’ are ideas that keep the story going and are alternately brought in by the actors, so that a story can be put together. In order to make the scenic play succeed, the willingness to change one’s own ideas and conceptions and create the story in cooperation with a partner is a basic and necessary attitude. Johnstone (2006b: 89) describes the process on stage metaphorically as collective swimming and sinking. This means that while one is improvising, he/she has to be open to let go of his/her own assumptions if the partner does not share them. More than ever, the attitude of ‘Yes!’ becomes an important part of making a collaborative, improvised story happen. After the ‘Yes!’, new information follows, adding an ‘and’. Unless we add something new, an improvised scene can’t move forward.

The most important rules of improv theater can thus be summarized as follows:

(1)The first idea counts! Accept your own ideas and the ideas of your partners by saying ‘Yes!’

(2)Add new information to keep the play going by saying ‘and...’

(3)There are no mistakes! If you fail, it is an opportunity to create something new.

(4)We want to see cooperation and teamwork on stage! Make your partner look good, so you will also look good working together on the story.

What if I say something that is not ‘right’?: Advantages of improv theater in language teaching

Reading these four basic rules carefully as a teacher of a foreign language, one can see that they are also very suitable for language teaching. In the following subsections, we will focus on three useful advantages of improv theater in language teaching.

Courage of allowing ‘mistakes’ to appear

The first parallel can be drawn with the learning process itself, as remarked by Huber (2003: 63, transl. by Haftner/Riedmüller): “The courage to be embarrassed is an essential feature of a good language learner.” In improv, this becomes obvious, since in the performance, not only the learning process but also the development of the scene is enabled by courage. The fear of making mistakes blocks this process. Therefore, spontaneity and creativity, which are important both in theater and language acquisition, can only happen when an actor is being courageous in performing and speaking. Specific exercises that help improv actors open up and not be led by their fears of failing also help foreign language learners overcome their fears of making mistakes and allow them to speak more freely.

The prerequisite for a theatrical experience lies in establishing a theatrical reality that – like any form of fiction – is an agreement between audience and performers. As Göhmann (2004: 100) states, the boundary between these two areas of reality, ‘as’ and ‘as if’, allows the performers and the audience to perform and witness different actions, behaviors, attitudes, perceptions and expressions. In the course of this, the performers/learners create a secondary, theatrical reality with the role they play, which enables them to move between the realities of the imaginary world and their daily lives. Here, they can experiment scenically and in terms of the use of the foreign language. Looking at it in a sociological way, theater presents a specific form of social interaction. Therefore, theatrical learning always involves social, interactive and aesthetic learning processes.

In the scenic representation of improv theater, one has free choice in defining the details of the scene, including, among other things of course, the main characters. Their properties and behavior are entirely fictitious, creating a distance between the real-life person of the actor and the character in the scene. This means that learners withdraw from their personal reality and enter into the fictional realm. Using the theatrical reality, the performers/learners can communicate at the level of their respective linguistic abilities while ‘hiding behind’ a fictional character. Huber (2003: 330) sees the foreign language as providing a ‘mask’ (a so-called ‘language-mask’), behind which the language learner’s self can be hidden, thus enabling him/her to act as freely and safely as possible. As Huber puts it (2003: 332), ‘Whoever wears masks does not need to save face!’

In improv-based foreign language teaching, learners have complete freedom of choice when choosing their role and can try out a variety of roles. This gives them an experimental flexibility that allows them to distance themselves from their own personal and perceived language skills. In this context, the focus is put on the skills of improvisation, not on the production of perfect language expression. During the dramatic process, we don’t use any speech correction. If the students are experiencing a limitation of their linguistic options, it is up to them to find strategies to express themselves so that their partners can understand them, or conversely, to help their partners find an alternate means of expression. This is an important step towards cooperative learning, in which the students support each other. Talking about linguistic errors should be handled in a separate teaching phase, apart from the theater exercises.

Authenticity of speech production

Another potential of the use of improv theater in language learning processes is its creation of an authentic, action-oriented and learner-centered space. As improv theater demands spontaneous play and impulsive speech production, the students become engaged with the proposed situations and develop them in an authentic, lifelike context, as Bach and Timm (2003: 11–12) suggest. In the context of improvised theater, the language is the consequence of performed actions. It is not forced, but appears naturally, almost as a second layer behind the actions and the story. In performance, the action triggers language use, not the other way round. By letting the learners decide about the content of the play, the speech intention comes from the learners and corresponds to the concept of learner orientation as outlined by Huber (2003: 61). Improv theater opens up a space where the language learners can use their already known vocabulary and find a linguistic expression. It enables an experience where they can try out their language skills in a safe and playful context.

Figure 1.1 Seeing the world through a character’s eyes. German teachers in a workshop in Chennai, India

A shift of the teacher–student relationship

As a teacher, the image Johnstone uses of swimming in the same ocean with the learners is highly suggestive. This approach is particularly important, because on the one hand, it means being yourself as a person, and on the other hand, being on the same level with the students. The teachers’ task is to support their pupils and to give them hints when they block their own or each other’s ideas. This is a very interesting issue in looking at improvising in intercultural contexts, because there you might be confronted with unfamiliar ways of telling stories, of creating characters, or of seeing the world, or with preconceived ideas about the culture that lies behind the foreign language you are teaching. This last point leads us to another important topic for improv: stereotypes and how to work with them on stage and in the classroom (Figure 1.1).

Finding the unusual with the usual: Expectations and surprises when playing with stereotypes

When faced with a new and different culture, one is always confronted with stereotypes in one’s mind. Stereotypes help us to simplify the social world, especially when we meet new people, by creating a common idea of people’s behaviors, appearances and beliefs. An advantage of stereotypes can be that they enable us to respond quickly to present situations we might have experienced or have heard of before. Of course, there is also the disadvantage of ignoring the actual differences between individuals and of generalizing an entire group of people.

As mentioned above, improvisational theater lives from the first associations and ideas that come to one’s mind. When improvisers start to create a scene, it is very helpful to build on other people’s ideas. It is nec...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Introduction: Going Performative in Intercultural Education: International Contexts – Theoretical Perspectives – Models of Practice
• Part 1: First Impressions
• Part 2: Focus on Schools (Immigrant/Refugee Children)
• Part 3: Focus on Teacher Training
• Part 4: Focus on Specific Performative Approaches: Process Drama and Playback Theatre
• Part 5: Focus on Performance and Biography
• Part 6: Performative Approaches to Intercultural Education: A Culture-Specific Perspective
• Index