Awareness of the “Hidden Curriculum” that Improvisational Theater Encourages in Teachers: Focusing on the Narrative About “Meaningless Things”

Abstract

This paper is intended to clarify the level of awareness of a “hidden curriculum” that improvisational theater encourages in teachers. Improvisational theater, often called “impro,” is a form of theater in which the performers create stories without scripts. Impro practitioners have developed many games, and the teachers, who are inexperienced in theater, can use impro easily in their classrooms by playing impro games with their students. However, impro has become “how-to” and “packaged.” Therefore, in 2021, I formed “Teacher x Impro Project in Mie” as a venue for action research, setting up a place for teachers to continuously learn about impro, and we started discussing how impro prompted teachers to reflect.

In this paper, I analyzed the sixth impro workshop held in March 2022. In addition to two elementary school teachers (Teacher A and Teacher B), three non-teachers participated. The workshop began with my question “Do you have anything you want to do?” Teacher A replied, “I want to do something that is seemingly useless.” We then played two games the meaning of which I cannot quite explain. During the final “reflection” session, it was confirmed that even things that seem “meaningless” can achieve “meaning.” Teachers continued to talk and think about “meaningless things” and the situation in their schools.

This paper describes a teacher who is caught up in what is “meaningful.” Teacher A felt the similarities between impro and the fun of doing unplanned and unintentional things that she experienced in her homeroom class. Then, in her post-impro “reflection,” she realized that “meaningful or non-meaningful” was decided by someone, and she referred to the “contradiction” of schools and organizations. Teacher B is exhausted by other teachers’ “attacks on ‘what is the meaning of this?’” in her school and continues to attempt to find clues for “giving meaning” to resisting such attacks. She feels uncomfortable with the fact that the various “meanings” that the word originally has been trivialized by being raised as an “educational goal.”

What is the “hidden curriculum” that impro made the teachers aware of? It is based on the idea that the school is a place to do “meaningful things” and that the teacher’s job is to convey to children the “meaning” of what is said to be “meaningful.” “Meaningful things” are praised, and “meaningless things” and things that cannot be clearly “meaning” are neglected or eliminated. And the work of schools and teachers is so full of “meaningful things” that there is no room for “meaningless things.”