A local teacher wants her students to fail and get over it – and the Burnaby school board has just approved a new course to help them do it.
Burnaby school trustees have approved Improvisation 12, a new performing arts course at Alpha Secondary School.
Charlene Agnew, the Alpha drama teacher who proposed and designed the class, hopes it’ll be offered at her school starting next September.
To her, improv is the theatrical equivalent of jazz and, paradoxically, just the thing for today’s anxious millennials.
She points to a quote by Chicago psychotherapist Dr. Mark Pfeffer in Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses “No, But” Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration—Lessons from The Second City.
“Every time you learn to be unafraid, your brain changes. [Improv is] the quickest way to get to the neural pathway change, because it puts [people] in a situation where they’re facing their fears.”
Agnew, an SFU theatre performance grad, knows of which she speaks. She has been taking improv classes at Vancouver Theatre Sports’ Improv Comedy Institute for more than three years.
“We’re creating art by committee, and the failure rate is very high,” she said of improvisation. “That’s another reason I wanted the course, because I think students need to fail and be OK with it and shake it off and try again.”
Agnew started working on the board/authority authorized (BAA) course in October and submitted her proposal on Dec. 1.
The one-semester, 120-hour Improvisation 12 class will cover improv basics, like character, story, spontaneity, environment.
Students will then take part in short-form improvisation (like Theatre Sports games), long-form improvisation and genre work.
With its emphasis on collaboration, critical thinking and communication, the course dovetails perfectly with the new high school curriculum coming in 2018/19, according to Agnew.
“This program is uniquely positioned to help students develop all of the core competencies,” she wrote in her proposal. “Successful improvisation teaches and requires students to connect with one another and collaborate in ways and depths that they do not elsewhere. In fact, improv is increasingly taught in business organizations to increase listening, clarity of communication, and cooperative problem solving.”
It also allows students to take risks and embrace failure in a safe environment, she said – something she expects to see a lot of in her new class.
“It’s going to be full of failure, and we’ll rejoice in it, and we’ll move on,” she said with a laugh.
