In drama lessons based on improvisation and role playing, participants express themselves spontaneously, take on various roles and act out by pretending. With improvisation, which is one of the two basic strategies used together with role playing in drama, the participants act in accordance with the designed dramatic fiction. The goal of this…

For many music students studying classical piano in tertiary institutions, techniques in improvisation are not included in their undergraduate curriculum. Despite the acknowledged musical benefits of improvisation, piano pedagogy curricula remain firmly rooted in the nineteenth century, focusing on the performance of the familiar canon of…

Student engagement in tertiary cinema studies can be fickle: while most students respond strongly to films, little regard is similarly paid to prescribed readings or other coursework that is crucial to developing complex critical thinking with media. This paper presents a case study of an intervention aimed to remedy this disparity of student…

The overall purpose of this article is to provide a convenient summary of empirical research on improvisation in general music education and thereby provide guidance to researchers and practitioners, using a systematic, narrative-review approach. By analysing 20 music education research articles, published from 2000-2015 in peer-reviewed journals,…

Improvisation is an important element of global musical practices. However, musical improvisation is often neglected in K-12 and collegiate music education programs, with some music educators suggesting that improvisation cannot be taught. Rather, improvisation must be facilitated, enabled, and fostered. In this review of literature, I examined…

This article concerns how the normative matter of body hair is playfully encountered within a theatre practice for teenage girls. By working with Deleuzian-inspired theories, playfulness is understood as embodied doings, interwoven with the local context. The article explores how playfulness is enacted in relation to the everyday, in particular…

Creativity can be measured with a variety of methods including self-reports, others reports, and ability tests. While typical self-reports are best understood as weak proxies of creativity, biographical reports that assess previous creative activities seem more promising. Drawbacks of such measures -- including skewed item distributions, a lack of…

While medical improvisation is emerging as a promising strategy for communication training, little is known about its effects on interdisciplinary healthcare teams and there is a need to advance knowledge about the impact of engagement during the training on communication skill improvement. We evaluated changes in communication skills among 132…

This paper gives an example of an inductive Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) process, adapting Anthony Ciccone's five conditions of a meaningful SoTL question. Presenting a study on pre-class reading in an undergraduate religion class, I describe how my question went through five life stages. I began with nine different pre-class…

Practice-based research is now widely accepted at doctoral level, and it is recognised that creative practice can be the mode, method, tool, object, subject and/or embodiment of research in the arts and humanities PhD. The growth of creative methods and arts-based methods also means that data is increasingly gathered through creative means in many…

The author reflects on the ingenuity and improvisation of black women as research methodology. She summarizes the contributions of the special issue to discuss the role and importance of creativity and lived experience in the work of black women researchers.

As collaborative artistic inquiries, studios challenge logical--analytical approaches to knowledge. Studio activities entail materializing artifacts to explore a range of management and organization issues. Theoretical references are currently needed to keep pace with the growing interest in studio-informed pedagogy. Inspired by organizational…

Creativity is considered to be an embodied concept, where internal psychological and external behavioral processes are intertwined. Creativity enhancement programs often target the cognitive side of this bi-dimensionality leaving the impact of motor interventions underexplored. To address this gap in the literature, we tested the effectiveness of…

This mixed methods action research intervention study analyzed the influence of social music improvisation (SMI) on students' behaviors and perceptions of their connectedness to others in a virtual middle school classroom setting. Nine 10-minute SMI sessions allowed for the accumulation of data, with two additional pre-sessions being informative…

This course design integrates the use of contemplative practices, specifically applied improvisational theater, into writing pedagogies to foster mindfulness and critical engagement. It explores the theoretical, neuroscientific, and practical rationale for incorporating contemplative pedagogies in writing classrooms, arguing that applied improv…