All the
Classroom’s a Stage
Sarah
Rose Cavanagh
One crisp fall evening during my freshman year of
college, I gathered up my courage and struck out across the campus to audition
for my university’s amateur theater season. In performance after performance, I
could tell I was pretty flat, and I could read an answering flatness in the
eyes of the judges.
After a series of frustrating flops, a young woman
popped out of one of the audition rooms and summoned three of us in. She
announced that — rather than reading lines from a play — we would be doing
improv.
Any form of acting involves vulnerability — of
taking something earnest inside yourself and laying it bare in bright light,
risking ridicule and rejection. But a script allows you some protection, at
least. You didn’t generate the ideas, you only delivered them. In improv,
however, it’s all you. Given only the sheerest of prompts, you share something
of yourself with no chance to consider, prepare, or rehearse.
The director explained that she would give us one
word and we’d act it out with whatever came to mind — words, movement, song. I
took a deep, nervous breath.
"Hymen," she said.
I froze. I felt exposed, my face hot. But I also
really, really wanted this part. So I closed my eyes. I summoned all of my
deep, conflicted emotions and surrendered to them, without judgment or sense of
propriety or shame. I became my feelings. And then I acted them out.
It was the only callback I received that day.
Teaching is acting. If you teach, you are acting.
Like acting, your best performance will stem from tapping into your true
emotions and connecting with your audience on an authentic level. But you are
still crafting an act using speech, movement, and props — and laying it before
a critical audience. Your highest hope isn’t that your students will approve,
necessarily, but that they’ll be moved, or somehow changed intellectually and
emotionally.
If you ask your students to participate in class
activities or discussions, they, too, are acting. They are pulling ideas and
words out of themselves, choosing different tones or stances, and putting all
of that on display for your approval.
I was already intrigued by the intersections of
teaching and acting when I ran across a recommendation by the psychologist Tom
Stafford that all teachers read Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, a 1979 tome about teaching improv by the acting
coach Keith Johnstone. Little did I know the book would forever change not only
how I teach but also how I think about human interaction in general.
Lessons on status and vulnerability. Early on in Impro,
Johnstone makes the claim that nearly every human interaction involves
manipulating one’s status with reference to someone else — making yourself or
the person you’re interacting with bigger or smaller, more or less important.
In the weeks after I read his book I saw people
manipulating their status everywhere I looked. An older couple on the train squabbling
over whose aches and pains were worse were jostling for status. In battles with
my 10-year-old, I now saw an innately high-status creature eternally frustrated
by the low status awarded her by virtue of childhood. Most heartbreakingly to
me, a passing female undergraduate in the hall scoffed to a male one: "I
have no idea how I got that A. Probably just lucky guessing."
Teachers, especially college professors, come with
high status preinstalled. We sweep into the room with our Ph.D.s, our jargon, our
mysterious notes to shuffle, and, of course, our ability to cast judgment on
students in ways that could open or close doors to their desired futures.
Then we demand that they stretch out their tender
necks and hazard guesses that might betray their ignorance or (worse) their
shallowness or strangeness of thought. "The student hesitates not because
he doesn’t have an idea," Johnstone says, "but to conceal the
inappropriate ones that arrive uninvited."
We ask students to risk all of that, not just in
front of us, but also before their peers, who wield a different sort of status
— the power to giggle or roll their eyes. "Laughter is a whip that keeps
us in line," observes Johnstone.
Such pressures are present for every student. But
just imagine how much heavier the burden for students who walk in already under
a big spotlight due to their ethnicity, gender identity, or disability status.
No wonder so many students risk getting docked a few participation points
rather than lay their unadorned thoughts on the table to be scrutinized. To
participate is to risk a lowering of one’s status.
What can professors do about that state of affairs? Johnstone suggests we
intentionally lower our own status — make ourselves vulnerable. In his own
classroom, he tells his theater students that if they fail, he is to blame, not
them. It frees students from worrying about losing status if they do something
wrong, and allows them to take risks.
A colleague of mine, Esteban Loustaunau, an
associate professor of Spanish, adopted a similar tactic in his courses.
Students often are leery of talking in the classroom, he says, because they
believe they start the class with an A and anything they share could lower
their grade. Cleverly, on the first day of class he tells them, "Right now,
you are all failing this class." That simple reframe illustrates that what
they say from that point on will not endanger their status but elevate it.
In Impro, Johnstone argues that it’s
critically important for teachers to model self-disclosure in the classroom.
Especially when you’re asking students to take creative risks, it does no good
to simply reassure them that they aren’t going to be dinged for the content of
those risks. A student needs "a teacher who is living proof that the
monsters are not real, and that the imagination will not destroy you,"
Johnstone writes. "Otherwise the student will have to go on pretending to
be dull."
The most dangerous phase — and how to avoid it. This past spring was one of the
worst teaching semesters of my life. I was unable to get students to volunteer
for critical class roles. They seemed resentful of assignments, and held me at
an emotional remove. That experience, so different from most semesters, has
honestly flummoxed me, particularly since it occurred during a semester in
which I had a reduced teaching schedule (thanks to a grant) and thus more time
to prepare and plan.
I stumbled onto a potential explanation in a work
by Paul Kassel, an actor, a professor, and dean of the College of Visual &
Performing Arts at Northern Illinois University. In his 2006 book, Acting: An Introduction to the
Art and Craft of Playing, Kassel warns of the dangers of increasing
competency. In delivering a highly polished presentation, you may have lost a
critical energy — both your own vitality and your capacity to evoke an
answering liveliness in your students.
When you have taught a class on a given topic 1,000
times before, all the decisions have been made, all the turning points smoothed
over into polished curves. That’s a problem because it is just that moment of
decision — what to do, what to say — that snags interest, that creates energy,
that keeps the audience on the edge of their seat: "Once a decision is
made the audience need not attend as closely, for decisions have inevitable
consequences. Once someone jumps up, we all know they will come down. It is the
deciding to jump that creates the suspense."
Having everything preplanned and running smoothly
in the classroom also means you are high status again — you alone know what is
coming next and how it will go.
It is scary to begin teaching a course that is
completely untested, that is loosely prepared, and that is flexible to student
input or to your own decision-making in the moment. But as Kevin Gannon, a
professor of history and head of the teaching center at Grand View University,
says in his teaching manifesto, "If I want my
students to take risks and not be afraid to fail, then I need to take risks and
not be afraid to fail."
Taking risks and trying new things also allows you
to approach your teaching from a playful, lively perspective. I had forgotten
the lesson I learned in my improv audition — that the best performances, the
most moving and effective ones, stem from the raw, authentic energy you summon
in the act of creating.
Consider what might happen if you release your hold
on your high status, if you chance being earnest and vulnerable, if you strive
to play.
Such is my plan for the fall.
Sarah Rose Cavanagh is an associate professor of
psychology at Assumption College and associate director for grants and research
at the college’s teaching center. Her book, The Spark of Learning: Energizing
the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion, was published in October.
