[MUSIC PLAYING]
It's clarified some of my classroom persona when we think of a classroom space that is highly rigid. And this creates a space for me to be flexible. It helps to decentralize the instructor as the sole voice of authority.
You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with Marlee Givens, Alex McGee, Fred Rascoe, and some dude--
[LAUGHTER]
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it.
Our show today is called "Yes And the Classroom."
[LAUGHTER]
No, I don't think I'm saying that right. What am I saying? Am I agreeing and then mentioning the classroom? Or is this about prog rock in education?
Ooh, I wish.
Are we "Yes Anding the Classroom?"
That's it. That's the one there, that last one. Today's show is about improv as a practice--
Ah, Yes And.
--applied to teaching, Yes And, yeah.
Teaching can be a performance. And sometimes students need to be engaged like an audience or maybe an improv class. Today, we're talking to a Georgia Tech professor and an improv performer about improv techniques and using them in the classroom.
And our songs today are about paying attention to the moment, being vulnerable. And to honor the spirit of improv, we're playing bands that are known for improvisation or jamming on stage. CHARLIE BENNETT: You mean jam bands? In fact, our sets today are single songs from live performances by jam bands and rock improvisers.
Fred, let me stop you right. I love the fact that the entire room has chilled. Just everyone's starting to say, oh, no, what have we signed up for?
Yeah, well, no worries because we're not going to play eight minutes of guitar noodling to start the show.
Are you sure?
Well, pretty sure. We're going to play a short song by a band that is known for long, long live jams.
Oh, that's a way to get out of it. OK.
Let's be in the moment with "Porch Song," by Widespread Panic, right here on Lost in the Stacks.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, my youth.
"Porch Song, by Widespread Panic. Our show today is called "Yes And the Classroom."
Isn't that "Yes And the Classroom?"
"Yes And the Classroom." And our guests today are Hannah Eppling and Cameron Winter.
Hannah is the owner of Little Characters Theater Company, out of Athens, Georgia-- go Dawgs. And the casting director of Theater Delta-- CHARLIE BENNETT: What just happened? Whoa, whoa, whoa.
[LAUGHTER]
Y'all--
This show is changing direction right now. This is some improv happening.
I've slipped it in, yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: Why don't you go and give Cameron a real introduction after I interrupted you. OK. Well, I need to finish. Hannah is the owner of Little Characters Theater Company, out of Athens, Georgia, and the casting director for Theater Delta, which uses interactive theater for social change.
And Cameron is a Marion L Britton postdoctoral fellow in the Writing and Communication program at Georgia Tech. Go Jackets.
OK.
[LAUGHTER]
I love the fact that I didn't proofread the script before we started. To begin our talk about improv techniques in the classroom, I felt like we had to get a big question out of the way first. So I asked Hannah, What is improv?
I had a feeling that was coming. Improv, in the wide sense of the term, is unscripted performance. That can look very different. I think the majority of people think of it as improv comedy. They think Amy Poehler. They think SNL. We have these cultural ideas of what improv is, and a lot of people think it has to be funny. But in reality, that improv is creativity and working together to create something that hasn't been created before.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Improv encompasses a lot of different styles and troupe compositions and things like that. Yes, yes.
Is there a kind of improv that you would say is yours or your particular expertise?
Yeah. I would say that-- so the majority of folks these days are doing a lot of short-form and long-form improv. And so that's when you go to Second City, and you see a completely improvised 10 to 30-minute show. That would be considered long form. The majority of my training is in short form and the game setting, so the improv games. The training that I started in high school was under a company called Comedy Sports. Before Comedy Sports there was Improv Olympics.
It's basically, you'd have teams, and you would do games against each other. And it's like the Whose Line Is It Anyway? The points don't matter, but it's fun. so I would say that game-centered improv would be my go to. CHARLIE BENNETT: So improv games, and you mentioned Whose Line Is It Anyway, which I think was the big cultural moment for improv. Yes.
It's almost like inherently the surprise and the putting the performers back on their heels is the comedic side of it. Someone's given an improv prompt that doesn't sound like it's going to work or is totally not their thing. Are improv games always, essentially, comedic?
Not always. So the number one rule of improv is, of course, the "yes and," that we can go into later and that everyone has pretty much heard of. But an unspoken rule is that to be a good improviser, you don't want to try to be funny. The funny comes with the authenticity and the honesty that comes from the actor just diving straight into whatever has been given to them.
Is it super vulnerable to be on stage improvising?
Yes, it's super vulnerable. I had a great improv teacher tell me recently, if you want to be funny, and if you want to make it about yourself, do stand up. If you want a group mentality, and you want to work together and really stretch yourself, do improv. And especially because people that sign up for improv are probably more comfortable hopping onto a stage than others. And so therefore, we tend to be leaders, and we tend to have ideas, and we want our ideas to be shown.
And so if you jump on stage with one other person with just giving a word, and one person starts, even if this second person has a completely different idea, they have to completely surrender to this idea and say, yes, OK, that's going away. And there's a lot of ego that has to be taken away in order for it to play out well. CHARLIE BENNETT: And you just said the thing about the prompt, which I feel like we should probably give anybody who feels lost in this conversation a quick definition.
You tell me if I'm wrong. So improv can be everything from a performer or two or many performers waiting for something to bubble up and then following that story in real time, all the way up to really rigid, almost like logic puzzles-- do this kind of speaking in this frame of reference with this particular inciting idea. Does that sound right? Yes.
Yeah. And so the standard Whose Line Is It Anyway? Game of sing a song about this subject in this style, go, no chance to prepare, that's that kind of game-ish thing.
Correc.
But then improv can also be, What story is waiting to happen in this moment between performer and audience?
Correct. And a lot of times, that prompting is coming from the audience. So there's some sort of emcee, or one of the actors is decided upon ahead of time of, OK, you're going to be the one interacting with the audience for calling out. And you can say name something that you ate for breakfast this morning or an unusual name for a pet. And then whatever [INAUDIBLE],, they pick it and--
Off they go.
Then off they go, yeah.
How long have you been doing it?
My first experience with improv was when I was 14, and so almost 20 years.
[INAUDIBLE].
So 20 years of experience, yeah.
Do you get better at it, or do you just get more open to doing it?
I'll say this, that while I've been-- while I started-- and it's been 20 years-- there have been, obviously, gaps in my life, not improvising all the time. There's parts that's like riding a bike, where you hop back in. But there's framework to improv, and there's framework to building of a story. In the first two lines, you want to establish a relationship between the characters, why they know each other, how they know each other, a place that you are and the why of why you're doing it.
And so I think practicing that and taking classes and even if you've been doing it forever-- and also, it's humbling, right? It's like, oh, I've been doing this for 20 years. I joined another class. My first day was awesome. The second day, I came in, thinking, oh, this will be awesome. And you're humbled by, oh, I just blanked on stage. So you never know.
So there's strategies. There's methods. There's things that you can practice doing that are not writing something to perform, but making yourself ready to think a certain way or preparing yourself to respond to certain prompts in the, quote unquote, "correct way."
Yes. And that's a huge tenet. So whether it's a one-hour improv class or preparing for a show, you're always going to do some warm ups, get your body and your brain open to ideas, something that-- and we'll talk about this, I'm sure. I've talked to Cameron a lot about it, is it's a very scientific term called the "internal editor." And we as people-- and it starts young-- have this voice in our head that says, that's not good enough. Don't say it out loud. Or that's not funny enough.
Or you're going to look like an idiot if you say this. And so therefore, we internally edit ourselves before we even allow ourselves to speak. And a lot of those warm-up games allow you to practice kicking out that internal editor and just sifting through the-- the rule is there's no bad choices. There's no bad answers. There's just ones that are stronger than others as long as you make a choice in moving the action forward and not just standing there doing absolutely nothing.
This is Lost in the Stacks, and we will be back with more about improv and teaching after a music set.
File this set under PR 6063 .A833 S65X 2007. CHARLIE BENNETT: You getting tired? It's so long, isn't it, and drawn out? Yeah.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That was "Slipknot," by the Grateful Dead, recorded live at Pembroke Pines, Florida, May 22, 1977. That was a song whose original lyrics were about making yourself vulnerable to improve the situation.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called "Yes And the Classroom." And our guests today are Hannah Eppling, an improv performer, and Cameron Winter, a writing and communication professor.
So, Cameron, you were mentioned in the last segment. And it didn't quite summon you, but now here you are. So we've gone through improv. And why is this compelling to you? Or actually, I should ask, are you a performer along with being a English professor?
No, I'm not formally an improv performer, though I would say that every person who's an instructor or a teacher or professor has to do a degree of performance. I've done some improv with Hannah. Hannah's the only formal teacher of improv that I've had and who I've taken some activities from to apply in the classroom.
But no, I'm not a formal improv performer, though I do see a lot of utility to classroom spaces to apply some of the principles of improv to achieve some of the goals that may be set for us by our institutions, our departments, and things like that.
So which came first? Were you interested in learning more about improv because of the connections to things that you've done for recreation and for work? Or did you say, I think I need to follow this idea to be a better teacher or to be better in the classroom?
It originally started as personal interest. And then as I was considering it, and I felt some contact with that idea of the internal editor appearing in my own mind, I couldn't help but see an applicability for learners in my classroom, that especially students that have been raised on the five-paragraph essay, the formal presenter version where they have to eliminate any ums and ahs that a very rigid, constricting classroom space.
And I see some techniques of improv that are useful for freeing them from that and allowing them to more naturally and authentically enter into not only the classroom, be it my own classroom or other people's classrooms, but also, professional spaces, so they're a little bit more comfortable. They can create space for themself.
Tell me about the way you started to imagine applying this stuff. Because those outcomes all sound great, but what was the way you said, let me try this in the classroom or in my teaching? CAMERON WINTER: So the first thing that I tried were some very basic improv exercises. One of those was a game called Sevens, another game called The Expert, or I think The Expert Activity, is that called, Hannah?
It has multiple names. I call it Babble. But we reframed it for your classroom setting, yeah.
Right. Yes, Expert, also known as Babble. And so with these two, mostly I saw a few things. Every student in my classroom is required by my department to do this introductory artifact, where they talk about some aspect of the-- and, Charlie, you're at Georgia Tech. You know that we are silly with acronyms.
Yes.
And so WOVEN is an acronym of the writing communication program. That stands for Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, and Nonverbal communication. Most all of them in this Artifact Zero, where they talk about strengths and weaknesses of the WOVEN curriculum, I'd say I did a very rough survey of this. About 65% to 70% say that they are hoping to work on oral and nonverbal communication.
So I saw it as a way to hit at some of those explicit needs that they brought with them into the classroom, these concerns they brought with them into the classroom. And a couple of activities I've applied for them. So one of them is Sevens. I adapted it to Fives. And in this game, they list just five things. And everyone has to keep eye contact with them. And as they say their list of five things, they'll say the thing, they'll clap, and they'll say, Yes. So it could be listing five drinks.
So I would say, Sprite, and then you and Hannah would say, Sprite, applaud, yes. And so-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Each individual-- CAMERON WINTER: --it's interesting.
--instance, you get a single clap. OK.
Yep, just a single clap. And so there's the fun of it, like, hey, being applauded just for listing something. And what was interesting was I gave them only that set of rules, just you list five of those things. After each one, everybody maintains eye contact and just claps and says the thing, and yes. They carry in a bunch of rules to this. One of them is don't repeat something that another person has said. I never said that they could not do that.
I could just rib every single one of your answers, Charlie, and it would still be an effective activity, like they would have still done it.
Didn't you say that they said it has to be funny? CAMERON WINTER: That was in Expert. It's like their other unspoken rule?
Yes, in the Expert activity. In the Babble Expert activity, they thought they had to be funny. And so there's these few things that I'm seeing of this internal editor that is a result of high school writing classrooms, that they have to be, in every case, purely original. And in certain contexts, they do have to make you laugh.
Being funny seems like it takes more work. And you have to be sharper and more interesting and more something. So I think sometimes, the being funny is you've got to be better. That's the shorthand for it.
The positioning of this is like, Is being funny always rhetorically effective? If I'm trying to exercise that side view that has the confidence, the well-spokenness of an expert-- in the Expert activity, they're speaking about something they've completely made up. They talk about the aspect of it. They just have to talk for a minute straight. And so they're just making up stuff. But being an expert does not always mean that you have to be funny about it.
And so in certain cases, that would be frowned upon. That would be strange and weird. If you're working for Lockheed Martin, and you're presenting to the Pentagon some new design for a jet engine, you're not going to be like ribbon jokes with five star generals. And so it's interesting.
The ways that you see this internal editor come out, you put them into these somewhat uncomfortable spaces, so that they can come into contact with some of these internalized editors that are throwing up these barriers of, no, or these gates of like, well, you have to do this.
You are listening to Lost in the Stacks. And we'll hear more about improv and the classroom from Hannah Eppling and Cameron Winter on the left side of the hour.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The biggest--
Hang on. Let me just do it.
Yeah, do the ID. That played the wrong thing there.
You are listening to WREK Atlanta, Georgia Tech student radio. And this is Lost in the Stacks. Not yet, Fred. Oh, man, stop improvising.
I'm just trying to liven things up, right? It's not a mistake if you commit to it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You're absolutely right. Go ahead and play it again. No, today's show is called "Yes And the Classroom"-- or no, "Yes And the Classroom." One of our guests, Hannah Eppling, has been performing and teaching improv for a long time. And I wanted to ask her. What is the greatest benefit and the greatest difficulty in using improv in performance?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The biggest benefit, I think, is being able to think from other people's perspectives, being able to think about others. I think, a lot of times in a performance piece that is scripted, there's always it's like theater. There's going to be mishaps. And so to have the training of improv to know how to jump in or know how to give your scene partner a gift of, "this is a kind of semblance of your line. Here you go." That's huge, and it goes a long way in just the support of each other, I think.
The biggest difficulty, I think it's ego. I think it is the "I got this." It's what Cameron was saying about these students. They wanted to just dive into this scene work and be wild and crazy. And that doesn't produce story. Yeah, the vulnerability, I think in a lot of people are afraid to be vulnerable in any spaces, let alone in front of others.
File this set under PS 3561.064E2. And yeah, I know it's not a set. It's just a song, 1983.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That was "Easy Money," by King Crimson, recorded at the Glasgow Apollo in Scotland, October 23, 1973, a song about, well, something scandalous, featuring a completely improvised middle section.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks, and our show today is an interview with Hannah Eppling, an improv performer, and Cameron Winter, a writing and communication professor. In the last segment, Cameron talked about bringing improv into the classroom and asking his students to in some way play improv games. Charlie had a follow up question.
Well, did you introduce these exercises as, hey, everybody we're going to do this thing? And then how did the students respond? Each class or one particular class, how did they first respond when they heard that you wanted them to do improv games, that you wanted to play Whose Line Is It Anyway? which might have been their one sort of cultural understanding.
Sure. Maybe this can go back to Hannah's comment of Yes And. I wanted to introduce, like, hey, you all might be familiar with improv. I think many of you probably have watched The Office. You know who Steve Carell is. But improv generally known as a comedic exercise. That's probably where they got you have to be funny for the Expert activity. But I frame that idea of Yes And a very specific way. I frame it in terms of the classroom goals.
One of them being collaboration is an important one that the Yes And is a social activity. It involves the reception of something, to which you respond Yes. You respond positively to the information you receive. You run it through whatever framework you're operating from. And the And gives us the creative side. You are building constantly on what somebody has given to you. I frame it like that. They seem to be like, OK, this seems like a neat little, fun activity.
I'm like, we're not going to be creating a sketch today. We're not going to be doing anything too intense. I did try that one time, and they didn't know what to do with it. It was the end of the day, I think they had been fried by the other two activities. So I've kept it in that rigid space. It's a good way for them to meet each other, to move between the tables, where they wouldn't normally interact with other people. So it does create more of a open classroom environment.
People feel a little bit more comfortable with each other to talk about other things. We'll talk about in the course. That might be a little bit heavier. They're more comfortable. They're more familiar. So there's some utility to that.
Hannah, you've been nodding as you've heard Cameron talk about this. I mean, does this sound like, Yes, of course, you would do that? Or were you surprised at all when you heard the idea of doing the improv with students in classes?
When he first came to me and said, I want to take some of the aspects of what we did at our improv night together, where I taught our adult friends, and apply it to the classroom, I mean, I just got jazzed. I got so excited. A lot of people don't know this, but the modern improv started in the classroom. And it started with a woman named Viola Spolin, and it was in Chicago. And she was working at a settlement house for immigrants.
And she used improv games to connect children with other children that lived close by, that none of them spoke the same language. And so from the get go, there's this communication tool that you can use for where there's various obstacles. And I get so passionate about the opportunity there, when it comes to working with people of different neurodivergencies, when it comes to different capabilities, or just levels of interest and/or experience. And so that's the nodding.
And I've been able to myself step in and guest lecture in some college courses, using improv in a bit of a different way than these games. And you do. You find there's a connection that is built between the people that do it that play ignites, that you don't often find other places. CHARLIE BENNETT: Cameron, did you have to go back and check in and get some advice after you started trying these exercises in the classroom?
Did you go to Hannah and say, "OK, this is what was going on, and this thing happened. Give me some advice," or anything like that?
Oh, yeah. We did one activity where they were sort of-- what's the tap-in activity called?
Freeze.
Freeze. They did Freeze, and they went super dramatic. They were having a hard time focusing on the Yes And part of it. Someone would start with Freeze. You have two people in the middle playing. And one person will start the sketch. The other person responds. They continue to build. And let's say one person gets tapped out, and another person comes in and kneels and then starts off the sketch, like, Will you marry me?
And the other person, instead of saying, like, "Oh, yes, I'm so excited about this. First of all, I want to make sure that my mom can come with us on the honeymoon," just throwing in something to make it interesting. They would go, "no, we're not getting married," and just go for the most dramatic option and just shut down what the other person has said. So I think there is a degree of maybe maturity that's required.
I think maybe too many of them watch Real Housewives before class, or something like that. It went for the dramatic. And so I think I've pulled back. I'm sticking in my first year composition space with a much more rigid-- a more rigid game space. But some people do improv in literature classrooms, for example.
There is hardly any peer-reviewed research on improv in the compositional classroom other than very poorly written articles that say, you should try to be improvisational with your teaching method. They give you no advice on how to do that; so peer review, everyone. But the one person wrote, identity and depth begin when the world comes into focus through me.
So building activities that encourage students to think from a specific character's perspective, to say, like, hey, why don't you have Hamlet write an email to Ophelia, a breakup email to Ophelia. Because that's exactly how Hamlet would break up with Ophelia, is through text or through email. So forcing a sense of identification, taking on their voice, there's utility to grow that. We can grow that sense of empathy with the characters we encounter.
And then that extends also to the other people we interact with on a day-to-day basis, thinking intentionally from their perspective, taking on maybe some of their voice, some of what you know of their experience. So outside of the composition space, where I have to focus on written, oral, visual, electronic, nonverbal communication, it has applicability in places that I'm somewhat tangentially related to, the literature classroom, especially.
This is Lost in the Stacks, and you've been listening to our interview with Hannah Eppling and Cameron Winter about improv and teaching. CHARLIE BENNETT: Hannah is the owner of Little Characters Theater Company, out of Athens, Georgia, and the casting director for Theater Delta.
And Cameron is a Marion L Britton postdoctoral fellow in the Writing and Communication program at Georgia Tech. CHARLIE BENNETT: It's a big title. File this set under PS 3618.U48L682022.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
FCC regulations do not permit me to talk about my true feelings about that song. That was "Weekapaug Groove," by Phish, recorded in Hamburg, Germany on March 1, 1997. That was a song about Yes anding to the extreme.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show is called "Yes And the classroom." Hey, guys, would you ever do it, what we were just talking about, improv in the classroom?
Yes and. CHARLIE BENNETT: Not the classroom. I've done it on stage, and it's really scary. I believe that.
Have done it, would do it again, wouldn't recommend it as a first date.
That's a story. FRED RASCOE: Possibly would do it. Not sure about in the classroom, though. CHARLIE BENNETT: I hope anyone who heard that section heard the actual question. Roll the credits.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARLEE GIVENS: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Alex McGee, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens. Legal counsel and six weeks of training for the Improv Olympics were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
Special thanks to Hannah and Cameron for being on the show, to all the improv performers in Atlanta, Athens, and beyond. And what was the name of the one here at Georgia Tech?
Let's Try This.
Let's Try This, OK. Thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form, if you want to get in touch with us, especially about the "Go Dawgs" I said earlier.
Next week's show, we'll revisit the OSTP memo. There will also be cake.
Cake or a baked good of some kind.
All right.
Time for our last song today. We'll end with another short song from a band known for jamming. Improv creates an environment on stage or in the classroom in which everyone can participate in their own way. Yes And is a way for everybody to join the story. So let's finish the show with "You Can All Join In," by Traffic, right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody.
[MUSIC PLAYING]