By: Dr. Cameron Lee Winter
At the beginning of each semester, instructors of First Year Composition II classes assign a common “Artifact 0.” These task learners with speaking to anticipated challenges with the course, especially those related to stated learning goals and “WOVEN” multimodal communications. Far and away the Oral and Nonverbal components dominate their thought regarding anticipated difficulty, with around 50% citing the former and 15% for the latter in one informal breakdown of data for my classes in 2023-4. When I inquire about this anxiety, students often recall the embarrassment of forgetting notes, choking up, unhelpful interjections by the instructor, and so on, revealing a fundamental anxiety about evaluation. After all, they are, in a sense, being rated for the way they speak, how they stand, and for how they share.
These anxieties are thus processed and internalized, cohering into an “editor,” whose personality may best be described as punitive. He operates on a list of contradictory laws, holds a red, bleeding pen in one hand, and looks upon the communicator with an unblinking smile (at least, that’s how my students render this editor visually). This “internal editor” networks himself across learners’ communicative pathways, limiting their rhetoric to rote recitations and rigid structural and intellectual frameworks. In the composition classroom, this manifests in writing as learner’s rigid adherence to five paragraph essays, rhetorical cliches, and an insistence on templates for completing simple argumentative writing prompts. Meanwhile, most of their work in the professional or extracurricular world is not so rigid, requiring an adaptable rhetorical approach that these methodologies do not adequately meet. In our composition classrooms, there is utility to rationalizing the problems with the five-paragraph essay or teaching them strategies for interjecting “their voice,” but this “internal editor” often remains a dominant, emotionally controlling presence.
Hannah Eppling, who instructs in a wide range of performative arts, defines the internal editor as:
the voice inside your head that says, “that’s not good enough,” “don’t say that – it’s stupid,” “you’re wrong.” [It is] the voice inside your head that stops you from making a choice before you even get the words out. Sometimes it can be helpful – there are circumstances in which an answer or choice is inappropriate. But most of the time, it’s the shame that blocks you from taking a risk because of fear of judgement.
Eppling locates shame as a central, orienting anxiety, limiting the range of choices for her actors and performers. This “shame” response, I believe, informs much our students’ encounters with communication, too, and is borne out by their anecdotal relations about the sour responses they’ve received in class presentations and paper feedback. How then should college composition instructors begin the process of decoupling students from this editor? How might we integrate practices that enable learners to freely, confidently, perhaps even comfortably lean into “making a choice” for themselves as they tackle the oral and nonverbal comms techniques with which they are so concerned?
I suggest that improvisation or “improv” may offer a potential strategy for decoupling students from this editor. Improv’s utility lies in not only breaking emotional barriers but also in recognizing and subsequently testing the conventionalities instilled in our learners. Unfortunately, the scholarship on improv as a performance art is limited, but the flexible spaces of the WOVEN classroom offer opportunities to explore the relationships between improvisational performance and creative yet still critical composition.
Keith Sawyer offers that improvisation as an art of “collaborative emergence” because “the outcome cannot be predicted in advance” and “no single participant can control what emerges” as “the outcome is collectively determined” (13). David Beckstead, summarizing neuroscience research on musicians’ brains, relates:
it appears that we access the region of the brain associated with sequence, planning, and problem solving when we play memorized or read passages. During improvisation, we deactivate this region and switch to cognitive processing associated with meditation, daydreaming, and complex, long-term multitasking. (70)
In this sense, improv in the composition classroom may enable learners to practice unusual rhetorical “violations,” moving outside of the rigid internal pathways of composition and re-envision composition as a state of continual, collaborative emergence. Students may also engage with practices that build mindfulness, creativity, and more complex thinking, and, with carefully paired discussion and reflection activities, be exposed to test new modes of process-oriented thinking.
But, what is improv and how may we explain it to our learners? The operative engine of performance-based improv is the philosophy of “Yes, And.” This ostensible simplicity masks its dynamic, social philosophy. In “Yes,” we see implied an explicitly positive reception of information between participants and a highly social dynamic. Additionally, “Yes” cultivates an environment of positive reception in contrast to the punitive yard of the internal editor. For participants, then, they enter a space of socialized positivity.[1] The comma makes space for a beat to process the information and opens thought-spaces to construct, reconstruct, or build upon what was received in the “And.” This conjunction must create in reference to its antecedent. Thus, the improvisational space is social, positive, and creative.
In the composition classroom, starting with some basic improvisational activities may be useful to cultivate this social, positive, creative space. Below, I share a few improvisational activities that I deploy, explore how these activities achieve the “Yes, And” philosophy and WCP’s learning goals of process, collaboration, multimodality. In this work, I hope to open discussions on the idea of the internalized editor and offer engaging activities for learners to envision composition as a merger between the critical, the creative, and the collaborative.
Improv Activities
Sevens
This activity is primarily useful for “warming up” students and helping them feel comfortable with one another. In groups of three to six students, students hold their hands together prayer-style and face toward the middle of a circle, standing where space and ability allow. The instructor will give them a subject, e.g., drinks, foods, sports teams, types of trees, movies, television shows, etc. A student within each group will begin to list items related to that subject. However, immediately after stating each item, the others will say what the student said, clap a single time, and say “Yes” with enthusiasm. They will do this for each item that the student lists until they reach their required seven. (I have also reduced the number to keep things moving a bit more quickly.) Then, move around the circle until everyone finishes. You may also set a timer, but I would recommend letting them engage with this activity for no longer than five minutes. Instructors should articulate that each person should list all seven items before moving to the next participant.
The concept of “Yes” is evident as students repeat each stated item and clap, combining positive verbal and nonverbal cues. In discussions following the activity, some students convey a struggle to list seven favorite things, while others find it hard to have undivided attention. However, many enjoy the positive feedback received. Overall, this activity serves as an effective warm-up for improvisation, fostering positive peer relationships and embodying the “Yes, And” principle very explicitly.
The Expert
In pairs or groups of three, one person will speak for a whole minute on a made-up, fictional, imaginary thing as if they are an expert. This thing cannot be real. During that minute, the non-speaking partner(s) should silently pay close attention. The next partner will go for a minute performing the same task as the original speaker and explaining on their own imaginary thing. Following each person’s speaking time, group members should be asked about what their partner(s) spoke about, sharing either with the class or with their partner what they recall of the fake-thing to gauge their recollection.
I also provide students with a reflection opportunity following this activity:
- As you were speaking, did you perceive negative internal feedback or difficulty?
- How did talking like an “expert” bear similarities or differences to your presentation style?
- How did talking like an “expert” bear similarities or differences to your conversational style?
- What was difficult in the listening aspect of the activity? What were you able to recall about the item? Why do you think you were able to recall it more easily than other parts?
- As best as you can, give an outline of your speech.
- In that outline, talk about what may have inspired or informed that section—a particular class, person, documentary, movie, and so on.
- Doodle your made-up thing.
This activity highlights the “Yes” in Improv, allowing students to perform as experts, encourages creativity without evaluative pressure, and reveals how expertise and credibility relies partially on performativity. Afterward in discussion, many students articulated a goal to make their presentations funny, which was not required. This, I believe, may be a good entry point for instructors to introduce other, multimodal activities leaning into the deconstructive utility of irony and play to the composition process. Others mentioned a struggle with generating content, which may be related to a kind of writer’s block. Here, learners can begin to articulate thought processes that prevented the creative ‘flow.’ Identifying those points of performative blockage are useful for instructors to target learners’ particular needs in the composition process.
Babble
Babble is a multi-level activity that takes place in three major parts and works best in groups of two, but a variation with three participants could work. In each part, individual participants will share for the full time (30, 45, or 60 seconds) before switching to the next person. Other participants should pay close attention and maintain eye contact. Once each person has responded, the activity should move to the next part. After each round, learners may be asked what they found difficult about the questions, what they discussed, or to summarize what their peer shared.
- Part 1: (30 seconds per participant): Share about anything with a positive connotation that is real. Examples include flowers, coffee, sunshine, and so on.
- Part 2: (45 seconds per participant): Share about what they want more of in their life. Encourage them to pick something that will not make your listening partner uncomfortable.
- Part 3: (60 seconds per participant): Share about accomplishing something they did not think they could accomplish but did. Here, you may also interject “The Expert” if you did not do this activity already.
You may follow this with a reflection in which students respond to the following questions either in discussions or via a journal reflection:
- How did it feel to divulge that information to a peer?
- What was the most difficult question to answer and why?
- What did you learn about your ability to speak to others?
- Describe your experience as a listener. What did you find difficult about listening to your partner? What did you learn about your listening abilities?
- Compose a similar question that you think may also be useful for this activity. Who would you like to ask this question and why?
This activity highlights the “Yes”—the positive and social aspects of improv through fostering closer peer relationships and encouraging participants to connect personally beyond professional roles (“What’s your major?” is a perennial, boring question encountered by the college student). In Tech’s professional environment, this activity’s focus on the personal enables students to present their goals and achievements in ways alternative to typical metrics of success: employment, career choices, salary, etc. While many learners will and should pursue these kinds of achievements, it enables learners to more adequately and personally communicate about their successes and align their authentic passions and interests with their career and achievements.
Living Portrait
In this activity, put students into a group of four to six students and give them a prompt to make a tableau vivant in five minutes. The prompts may be provided to groups by the instructor and secretly. Secrecy does have the benefit of enabling more class participation with the performance, and can make for some humorous interpretations. Each group will share their performance with the class.
Some helpful prompts to provide the groups include:
- What is being a freshman like?
- How was move-in day?
- Show me Georgia Tech’s football program.
- What is the dining hall like?
Students may reflect after the activity in discussion or journal reflections:
- What prompt was your group responding to?
- What was the most difficult part of this activity? The easiest?
- What did you feel your role within the group was?
- What were the initial ideas you offered up to make the “living portrait” and describe how your suggestions were received?
- How did that reception make you feel?
- Describe how you received or implemented yours and others’ ideas.
This final activity encourages students to engage with the full range of the “Yes, And” activity: positive, social, and creative work, serving as a strong conclusion to previous performance tasks and allowing learners to engage with most classmates. Before beginning, it would be beneficial to reinforce the values of improvisation, particularly positivity and collaboration, as participants express a wide range of personal and emotional responses to the prompts. Regardless, students are able to engage with the course goals of collaboration in a fun, expressive, evaluation-free space. The internal editor may appear and limit how they engage with one another, but the lack of meaningful templates, prompting, and evaluation enables opens the creative space, especially in using unusual nonverbal cues to indicate meaning. Additionally, instructors could take pictures of their performances to post on the course site to foster students’ sense of ownership in the class experience.
Conclusion
These simple improvisation activities foster in-class camaraderie and enable students to begin exercising creative, expressive oral and nonverbal communication skills. Working outside of the typical “presentation” framework, students encounter other expressive options and with carefully paired discussion and reflection may come to evaluate the contours of the internal editor indirectly and critically. Integrating other improvisational performances or writing activities may allow for further engagement with other modalities’ “internal editors” for students and can emphasize a synthetic approach to multimodal composition. Finally, should instructors seek to incorporate more in-depth, story-driven Improv activities, they may consider seeking the input of DramaTech or other on-campus organizations.
Works Cited
Beckstead, David. “Thinking and Playing Music.” Music Educators Journal, vol. 99, no. 3, 2013, pp. 69-74.
Eppling, Hannah. Personal Conversation. 6 September 2022.
—. Personal Conversation. 19 January 2024.
Sawyer, R. Keith. “Creative Teaching: Collaborative Discussion as Disciplined Improvisation.” Educational Researcher, vol. 33, no. 2, 2004, pp. 12-20.
[1] In more advanced improvisational classes, this requires a more hands-on approach by the instructor to ensure that all participants feel safe and welcome. It is important to know when something offered may not be comfortable for participants to engage with or could be triggering. For the purview of this essay, we will be examining activities that generally avoid controversial or upsetting topics.
