“Improvisation” as a Key Curricular Concept in Professional Teaching

Author(s):

Magne Espeland(presenting / submitting)Helga Aadland(presenting)Trond Egil Arnesen

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 07 E, Professional Knowledge & Teacher Identity: Self-efficacy

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-23

17:15-18:45

Room:

K5.02

Chair:

Aileen Kennedy

Contribution

In this paper we discuss the concept of improvisation as a professional teaching skill. Our professional context is teacher education and our discussion is aimed at developing a categorized understanding, or rather a tentative typology, of what professional improvisation in teaching and teacher education might be. Undertaking such a bold endeavour has included a literature review and in-depth interviews with practicing physical education teachers. We argue that improvisation in teaching needs to be professionalized. We suggest that a tentative typology of professional improvisation should include sequential, dialogic and exemplary improvisation, and that a description and introduction of such a typology could be a first step towards making improvisational skills accessible to student teachers as part of their pre-service teacher education. We conclude by arguing that further research is needed within classroom teaching and teacher education contexts in order to explore how improvisational practices in teaching could enhance education, as well as student learning.

The backdrop and research context for this article is our participation in the research project ‘Improvisation in Teacher Education 2012-2016’ (IMTE), aiming at studying, developing and reforming teacher education programs at Stord/Haugesund University College (SHUC) in Norway. According to Boyd et al. (2009) ‘…there are fierce debates over the best way to prepare teachers…’. ‘Most agree, however, that we lack a strong research basis for understanding how to prepare teachers’ (Boyd et al., 2009: 416). However, recent international research on teacher education seems increasingly to focus on the importance of teaching quality rather than teacher quality maintaining that current trends in research on practice- based teacher suggest that “novices must learn to deal with uncertainty as teaching in this manner is partially improvisational” (Knight et al., 2015, p. 106 )

Our theoretical starting point is Bernstein’s (2000) theory on vertical knowledge construction and theories on professional improvisation in education (e.g. Sawyer 2011). Bernstein uses the concepts of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ to describe knowledge construction arguing that the former represents discourses (in a wide sense) which are coherent, systematic and hierarchically organised whereas the latter is characterized by being everyday, common sense and local. (Bernstein 2000). Keith Sawyer (2004, 2006, 2011) builds on the writings of influential American educational theorists such as Elliot Eisner (1979, 1983), Sarason (1999) and others, who had strong connections to the performing arts. Although building on their achievements comparing teachers and artistic performers, Sawyer offers a constructive critique of this tradition, arguing that these writers to some extent have marginalized the importance of ”structure” and the domain specificities in educational practices.

We suggest that the qualities and distinctions characterizing professional improvisation in teacher education as experienced in the different aspects of the IMTE project, point towards professional improvisation as a form of knowledge construction that is more dynamic than Bernstein’s model for knowledge construction. We argue that improvisational repertoires as a key curricular concept in teaching and hence teacher education are highly influenced by educational and subject traditions, and that professional improvisation only can be described as a vertical knowledge construction when we are able to establish a typology of different forms of improvisation. Findings in our review studies and case studies suggest that such a typology could be tentatively structured around three overlapping, but still different pillars in a vertical knowledge structure: 1) Professional improvisation as responsive dialogue; 2) Professional Improvisation in the use of sequences in Teaching, and 3) Exemplary Improvisation: Improvisation in the choice of examples and forms of activation

Method

This study on improvisation in education is theoretical and conceptual as well as empirical. Our literature review was designed to give us a map of the terrain of improvisation in education rather than a comprehensive interpretation of different educational theories and curriculum methods regarding improvisational elements (Montuori, 2005, p. 376). We started searching contemporary literature on “improvisation in education” using search engines such as Google Scholar and ERIC but soon engaged in closer investigations of established educational theories in which we hoped to find descriptions of educational processes close to our initial understanding of professional improvisation in teaching. However, the need to base our thinking in a context wider than our own experience and review studies soon became evident. Yin (2003) argues that one rationale for using a single case study design is to test a well-formulated theory with a clear set of propositions. A single case study, he writes, “can then be used to determine whether a theory's propositions are correct or whether some alternative set of explanations might be more relevant” (Yin, 2003, p. 38). Believing that improvisational skills are important in all kinds of teaching, and are context as well as domain specific, we chose to discuss our initial typology with novice practicing teachers. We wanted to know if and to what extent they had been trained in or been made aware of improvisational teaching skills in their pre-service programmes (Stake, 1995; Kvale & Brinkman, 2009). We chose to conduct an instrumental case study by conducting in-depth interviews with four teachers selected through purposive sampling (Stake, 1995). We used semi-structured in-depth interviews to gain insight into to what novice teachers think about professional improvisation as a concept in teaching with empirical reference to their daily teaching in physical education and their pre-service teacher education programmes. In this way, we wanted to explore and test our conceptual thinking in the shape of a typology of professional improvisation in teaching that emerged from our literature review (Stake, 1995) and also discuss implications for teacher education. Before the interviews were conducted, the teachers received an interview guide and a description of the intention of the thematic content of the interview. The interviews revolved around the following three core questions: When do you improvise in your teaching? To what extent do you find our typology of professional improvisation meaningful for what goes on in your own teaching?

Expected Outcomes

Our interviewees confirmed our conceptualisation of teaching as largely improvisational, e.g.Tom, who relates his improvisational practice to his PE (Physical Education) toolbox. When presented with our model with categories of different types of professional improvisation, he immediately refers to sequential improvisation as the most important for him. He also recognizes dialogical improvisation, understood as his dialogic response to input from his pupils, e.g., about the rules of an activity: “…then you have to improvise somehow, in such a way that the students feel more at home in the activity, maybe change the rules a little bit, or maybe answer by referring to their experience in other contexts…solve things they feel uncertain about, this is important in dialogic improvisation”. Our preliminary empirical findings suggest that the concept of “professional improvisation” in teaching physical education is a much needed element in theory and practice. Even if our novice teacher informants had never reflected on “improvisation” as a teaching skill, they recognized their own practices in our typology of professional improvisation. In many ways this is a surprising finding given that our teachers had never reflected on improvisation in their work and had not been given any form of pre-service education in improvisation theory or practice. Even if we are pleased with the fact that our small empirical and instrumental case study seems to support our theoretical thinking in terms of specific categories of professional improvisation—sequential, dialogic and exemplary—the need to discuss what measures and recommendations to give to teacher educators remains. At this stage, it seems that issues must be addressed in further research, e.g.: - Developing awareness and knowledge about different types of professional improvisation. - Offering special contexts with rich potential for enacting professional improvisation in a safe environment.

References

References (most important) Berliner, P. F. (1994). Thinking in jazz: The infinite art of improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bernstein, B. B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control, and identity: Theory, research, critique (Rev. ed.). London: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher. Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (2009). Developing the theory of formative assessment. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 21(1), 5-31. Boyd, D. J., Grossman, P. L., Lankford, H., Loeb, S., & Wyckoff, J. (2009). Teacher preparation and student achievement. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 31(4), Holdhus, K., Høisæter, S., Mæland, K., Vangsnes, V., Engelsen, K. S., Espeland, M., & Espeland, Å. (2016). Improvisation in teacher education – roots and implications: A review of relevant literature. Published: 4 July 2016, Cogent Education, Teacher Education & Develpoment https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2016.1204142 IMTE, (2012-2016). Improvisation in Teacher Education, Retrieved from: http://prosjektsider.hsh.no/imte/ Knight, S. L., Lloyd, G. M., Arbaugh, F., Gamson, D., McDonald, S. P., Nolan Jr., J., & Whitney, E. A. (2015). Reconceptualizing teacher quality to inform preservice and inservice professional development. Journal of Teacher Education, 6(2), 105-108. Montuori, A. (2005). Literature review as creative inquiry reframing scholarship as a creative process. Journal of Transformative Education, 3(4), 374-393. Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Yin, R. K. (2003). Case study research: Design and methods (3rd ed.). London: Sage.

Author Information

Magne Espeland (presenting / submitting)

West Norway University of Applied Sciences

STORD

Helga Aadland (presenting)

Western University of Applied Sicences

Stord

Trond Egil Arnesen

Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL)

Faculty of teacher education and cultural studies