The Roman scholar Quintilian, master of rhetoric (public speaking), wrote that
although it is essential to bring with us into court a supply of eloquence which has been prepared in advance in the study and on which we can confidently rely, there is no greater folly than the rejection of the gifts of the moment.
Quintilian (1920)
In my work in education, as I study learning, improvisation, and teaching, I’ve been trying to articulate how we (teachers, learners, everyone) can best make use of these “gifts of the moment,” and how we should conceptualize the ability to do so.
There is a lot of writing in education about helping teachers become “reflective practitioners” (a term popularized by Donald Schon, 1983), ones who continually reflect on and thereby improve their teaching practice. I fully embrace this idea, and believe that no matter what we are learning, teaching, or doing, reflective practice helps us become better at these things. Thus toward the end of our improv classes, we reflect on what our goals were for the day, whether we met those goals, and what goals we will set for ourselves for the next class, all while considering what worked (and what didn’t) during the class that had just transpired.
In the moment of teaching, of learning, however, I would argue that while we bring to bear a range of thoughts and reflections (in the manner of Quintilian bringing “into court a supply of eloquence which has been prepared in advance in the study and on which we can confidently rely”), what happens in the moment isn’t a reflective practice. And yet, it is not a reflexive (or thoughtless) practice either. What lies between reflection and reaction?
The jazz scholar Tracy McMullen (2016) characterizes improvisation as “responsive” rather than reactive. She argues that in the moment of improvisation, we should think of what takes place in terms of “non-conceptual knowing,” a type of knowing which she links to the Buddhist idea of shunyata, “a state of non-conceptual knowing that understands “not arising; not ceasing; not arising and ceasing together” (p. 119). For McMullen, this term makes sense because when we focus on either “arising” or “ceasing” we focus either on what has come before or will come after the moment, but for her the essence of improvisation is a wholehearted embrace of the moment itself, on “abiding without deciding or anticipating” (p. 119).
When we improvise on stage as comedy performers (my milieu), we describe the goal as trying to avoid being “in your head.” When you are “in your head” you worry about what will come next, where the scene will go, where you might want it to arrive. When we avoid this, when we abide in the moment (to borrow McMullen’s phrasing), we trust ourselves and our partners, trust that working together we will find our way, that we know what to do and how to do it.
In contrast to many scholars of improvisation, though, my own belief is that this trust need not be earned. Many scholars argue that we need a strong knowledge base from which to improvise (an argument that makes sense to me in a jazz context). However, I am particularly interested in how learning works, how we move from being a beginner or a neophyte to competency or mastery. And from my own experience as both a teacher and a learner, and my own knowledge of learning as the mastery of discourse, which necessitates improvising with little expertise (see Gee, 1989), I have become convinced that even amateurs and beginners may improvise successfully, if we can teach them how to work in a responsive, improvisative mode, and to accept the “gifts of the moment.”
References
Gee, J. P. (1989). Literacy, discourse, and linguistics: Introduction. Journal of Education, 171 (1), 5-17.
McMullen, T. (2016). The improvisative. In G. E. Lewis & B. Piekut (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, vol 1 (pp. 115-127 ). New York: Oxford University Press.
Quintilian (1920). Institutio oratio. London: Loeb Classical Library. Retrieved from http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/10C*.html
Schon, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How practitioners think in action. New York: Basic Books.