Examples of Work-in-progress Under Phase G
Work-in-progress Presentation
Narrative Outline
JS
Outline of Work-in-Progress Presentation
Governing Question:
What are the steps that I can take to engage the adult learning communities in using the principles of theater arts to prepare them to create social change?
Presentation Title: "Bringing the fun back to adult learning through theater-based education towards emerging priorities"
Initial Assumptions and Perspectives
1. three different major elements of this question: theater arts, adult education, and social change
2. meanings: social change refers to the ways that a community comes to agreement upon social challenges and the way that they approach the decision-making and action needed to address them; could include the areas of health and safety, preventing crime and violence, awareness of broader issues of the environment, employment fairness, and access to education; adult education includes the learning environments in which adults intentionally find opportunities to define goals and take part in learning to reach them; theater arts include the types of performance that involve any use of voice, body, staging, and props to create an alternative reality
3. main idea is that there is a way in which adults can take on a view that ongoing education is enjoyable, and that it can serve a purpose beyond professional skills training or personal life enhancement; education can be structured to help people to structure their learning so that as well as it benefiting themselves, it also can enable their individual abilities to complement each other toward an improvement of their entire community and world; to me, many principles of the theater arts support this because they can help people to understand alternative points of view, find greater empathy for the ideas of others that they don’t originally understand or appreciate, find common ground with others, and become more aware of how their own attitudes influence the way that their actions affect others; also, theater arts provide a very natural way to practice the actions that might be part of social change in a safe environment, as a lead-in to actually taking action in their real lives
Research findings and Activities
1. The connection between theater and social change has been well-established, particularly in Africa and Latin America. The use of ideas such as “Theater of the Oppressed” and its derivatives like forum theater and popular education have used theater in public settings to create awareness and knowledge of many issues - disease prevention, dealing with military/police brutality, water cleanliness, and parenting skills. A fundamental need of this theater is that it is participatory - there is no separate actors/audience - all people can take roles “on stage”. Also, formal acting training is not needed for participation.
2. Through some of my reading, interviews, and discussions, current practice of using theater in social change in the U.S. is often more narrow - these efforts tend to be designed and initiated by experts in theater but are often presented to organizational clients in the form of leadership training or workplace collaboration. The people that do this are practitioners who are providing a service to organizational clients, or sometimes as performance-based activities for schools.
3. There is much more to be realized in the way that theater arts may be introduced as a tool in teacher education. The greatest need seems to be to provide ways for the adult learning community to be aware of how the theater arts can benefit them and understand how such methodologies can be connected directly to how the learning experience is helping to establish the skills that enable social change.
New Ideas
1. subversive view of “adult education” - traditionally focused on professional skills training and continuing education in the traditional of personal life enhancement - see a view in which adult. ed. becomes most strongly associated with social change
2. believe that the “methodologies of theater arts” are actually more fundamental aspects of human behavior and thinking, and they just happen to have been captured as a tool of theater and have since been transformed into merely performance; believe that the adult learning community may also claim these as their own.
Future Needs
1. In terms of the steps that I can take, I see a greatest need in:
a. helping adult learners and teachers to find the potential of using the theater arts as a part of their learning situation. This might take the form of a workshop that can be introduced to adult learning communities and introduces basic concepts of the theater arts to adult learning groups. - making the connection directly from the theater arts to teaching in the adult learning world, from the point of view of applied theater in education
b. finding elements of existing adult education environments that are already working toward social change and help to form a collaboration between them in this particular area, such as an ongoing practice group for discovering new ways to use theater within their own contexts - these could include centers for adult/continuing education, community activist groups, or neighborhood groups.
Initial Assumptions and Perspectives
- three different major elements: theater arts, adult education, and social change
- meanings of each
- main idea
Research findings and Activities
- theater and social change Africa and Latin America
- theater in social change in the U.S. is often more narrow
- theater arts may be introduced as a tool in teacher education
New Ideas
- subversive view of “adult education”
- “methodologies of theater arts” are actually more fundamental aspects of human behavior and thinking
Future Needs
- workshop
- adult ed. ongoing practice group
Questions
- do you see other ways that this idea is relevant in your own teaching/learning situations?
- as an adult, what do you want in your own learning situations to make them more enjoyable?
Presentation, Part 2
Overview of Project and Initial Assumptions
- neglect as an adult learner
- usually, mention of “education” means primary/secondary/university, and even adult education usually means professional skills development or personal life enhancement
- experience in adult ed, theater, social change led me to feel that there was a relationship between these that was unfulfilled
- relationship centers on the idea that change can happen through learning at a community level as well as an individual one, and that’s where I needed to focus my attention
New Directions
- after my research, I’ve found so far that there well-established relationship between theater and social change (forum theater)
- also, there is an emerging relationship between the course of adult education and social change - in my opinion, the pioneers of adult education are advocating a focus on learning that targets how we can address social issues, and I think that’s the right track
- greatest need - stronger relationship between adult. ed and theater, because this is what I think will provide a medium to return the natural joy and fun of learning, because using theater provides a lot of powerful tools for ideas like taking on alternative points of view, helping us to find common understanding of social issues, and find common ground with others in the course of problem-solving
- right now, I think this relationship exists but seemed to be owned by people experienced in theater who bring activities to education, but this focuses much on children; I think the direction of my work needs to be to work with those in adult learning to understand how these tools can be available to them in a long term process, and find ways that adult learners and teachers can take ownership of them in such a way that they support social change and collaboration
- extract the “generic” parts of theater
- turn the notion of adult education “on its head”
Questions/Clarifications
- 1-minute activity - want a starting point for a dialogue about becoming aware of how we make judgments about others and what we think they want
- Discussion of the learning group
- one initial idea is that a kind of ongoing support group for those in adult education - learners and teachers - a way to experiment with activities such as this and find ways to both tie them to helping support social change as well as find practical ways to apply them in the learning setting/classroom
- pretend that you are all part of the adult learning community, and I invited you to join this support group; I want to know: what would cause you to come in the first place?
- how would the group meet or communicate on an ongoing basis?
- what would make you feel comfortable about participating - bringing ideas for activities, sharing your experiences, etc?
- in situations where you participate in any kind of ongoing activity, what causes you to keep going back?
JS
Narrative Outline
Governing Question:
What are the steps that I can take to engage the adult learning communities in using the principles of theater arts to prepare them to create social change?
1. In my own experience, I have come to support fundamental principle of adult education as a means of achieving social change, although I currently find this field, particularly in North American culture, to be primarily focused on professional skills development instead. My involvement as an adult education teacher, administrator, and student has demonstrated that learning for social change seems to be rarely considered in the needs of curriculums, classrooms, and lifelong learning settings.
2. Social change involves learning in which people can collectively use their knowledge to collaboratively improve the conditions of their social environment, which affects all members of a community.
3. Traditional learning and teaching methods are insufficient for preparing adult learners for social change because they often imply a didactic style of transfer of subject-level information in a unidirectional style from teacher to student. In the learning toward social change, other principles must be considered which account for the existing experience of adults, their ability to organize their collective knowledge and understand each other, and the ability of adults to work together and take over ownership of the direction of their learning and the resulting action.
4. Through my more recent experience in theater-based learning experiences, I have found that the fundamental tools of theater seem applicable to adult learning. These are the tools that allow for the reflection of and experimentation with the core elements of human behavior in collaborative situations, such as empathy, point-of-view, interpersonal interaction, and dialogue. Also, they represent an enjoyable way to learn because they use a very natural concept of “character” in learning - the ability to discover and use one’s “alternative selves” as a way to let go of personal inhibitions, take a perspective of another person, and envision a new reality in which social issues are changed.
5. One step that I can take is to develop an idea for ways to engage adult education communities to understand these tools. Because I view it to be critically important that members of this community experience these first-hand, I will consider the way that a “theater for social change” ongoing learning group could be formed and supported, including how to define the structure of the group, how to engage adult educators to attend, participate in, and support the group, and how to introduce the tools of theater to the group in a way that allows the participants to associate them most effectively with the teaching of social change in their own areas.
6. Another step that I can take is to define more specifically the ways in which the methods of theater can be used directly to teach social change. This can take the form of a series of examples and suggested applications that help those in adult education to use the theater methods most relevant to social change. These applications may serve as a foundation of educational curriculum, teaching methodologies, and in the way that the educational environment is set up.
