Challenging the Past and Imagining the Future: Teacher Learning Through Critical Improvisation

• In Event: Centering Justice: The Political and Ethical Commitments in Teaching, Learning, and Learning to Teach

Abstract

Improvisational theory accounts for the interactional relation between people's historical experiences and their imagined futures. In mathematics classrooms, improvisation shapes how teachers embrace and/or deny their students' histories of marginalization, resistance, and power within moment-to-moment interactions. A critical improvisation lens can support mathematics teachers in organizing learning that leverages students' histories, their diverse epistemologies, and their sense of possibility in the vast, and sometimes seemingly disjoint, ways that students show up in mathematics classrooms. Faced with structural inequalities that perpetuate historically dehumanizing understandings of who produces mathematical knowledge, racialized youth deserve to be valued for the knowledge producers that they are and always have been.

My critical improvisation framework brings together insights and methods from improvisational theater (e.g. Halpern, Close, & Johnson, 1994; Johnstone, 2012; Spolin, 1983), black performance theory (e.g. DeFrantz & Gonzalez, 2014; Johnson, 2006), and critical black scholarship in education (e.g. Ladson-Billings, 2000; Martin & Gholson, 2012). I define critical improvisation as the continuous process of unapologetically challenging dehumanizing norms through strong and caring relationships. This differs from the often-lauded constructivist perspectives on improvisation (e.g. Sawyer, 2004) in that it extends beyond viewing improvisation as a collection of practices, and embraces it as an ontological commitment.

Four middle school mathematics teachers volunteered to participate in this semester-long study. Data collection and analysis derived from ethnographic field research (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995; Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2013) including interviews, classroom observations, and professional learning time dedicated to experiencing improvisational exercises and critical reflections on experiences in and outside the professional development space. A case study approach (Flyvbjerg, 2006) was used to explore how challenging the past, in a teacher professional development design founded upon a critical improvisation framework, supports teacher learning to imagine future opportunities for re-humanizing mathematics teaching.

A critical improvisation perspective holds great potential for supporting re-humanizing pedagogy and can serve as a crucial companion to established, just teaching practices. In the cases of Danielle and Jo (pseudonyms), they named a need to evaluate personal historical bias, and the possibility of more options to respond to their students. In other words, critical improvisation can: (1) support teachers’ more complex understandings of self in relation to lived histories as they are reproduced systematically in the present day; and, (2) facilitate reimagining the self as intentionally working toward being a force of re-humanization in everyday teaching through the praxis of consistent attention to improvisational interaction and critical reflection.

These findings provide insight into how teacher learning through critical improvisation works toward re-humanizing mathematics teaching and learning. Improvisation affords for making connections, building trust, justifying the unexpected, and reaching deeper levels of response (Halpern, Close, & Johnson, 1994; Spolin, 1983). Improvisation offers the possibility for engagement with richly augmented interactions that disrupt and extend (Moten, 2003) normalized discourse, and movement toward disassembling dominant narratives (Rusert, 2012). As a consequence, the extension of improvisation into a more critical approach toward teaching and teacher education has the potential to foster movement toward a stronger conceptualization and practice of teaching.

Author

• Ashley Danielle Scroggins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology