On combining psychological science and the richness of theatre.
One of the very first times I ever presented my research to an audience of theatre scholars was also one of the hardest moments of my career.
I had traveled to a small meeting/symposium about theatre education in the third year of my PhD, proudly carrying with me one of the first sets of results tying experience in acting classes with higher levels of the social-emotional skill of cognitive empathy (this is the ability to understand what someone else is feeling). It was just a simple correlational study, comparing kids with theatre experience to kids without theatre experience, and just one or two measures of understanding somebody else's mental and emotional state.
But as a 3rd year student I was very proud, and I thought it was the beginning of something. (I was right about that). I got about 10 minutes into the presentation showing some of the results and someone in the audience raised their hand. I wasn’t expecting that. I looked at them - a scholar at least 20 years older than me. They stood up and said “well, you know what they say, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” And then they turned around walked out of the room. Everyone was kind of silent, and looked at me to react.
I had never experienced anything like that before - neither in the interruption nor in the absolute dismissal of my work publicly. And I was presenting positive results! I was sort of in shock; I gave a quick laugh and finished my presentation. Happily, several people came up to me afterwards and said that they liked the work, they thought it was interesting, and to ignore the sour grapes of that one scholar. But it shook me a bit, and gave me pause and further thought on how to introduce and think about presenting to people outside of the world of psychological science. Now, when I give a talk, I have a caveat at the beginning about how my scientific lens is specific and purposeful, and is not meant to dismiss a theatrical perspective.
I still think about that presentation and that scholar’s aggressive reaction a lot in the broader context of the difficulties of combining a field that is as complex and rich as theatre, and a field that values specificity, exactness, and scientific rigor. I've haven’t had anybody storm out of a talk since then, but I've had a lot of conversations about how to make sure that when we measure, conduct experiments on, and engage from a scientific perspective with a field that often is suspicious of science, I am giving full weight and value to the ways in which theater works.
This is why the habits of mind as a general educational framework is so very productive and useful. While the Acting Habits of Mind are given single labels such as be flexible, from a psychological perspective this can incorporate a wide number of skills and abilities that are typically measured as singular constructs in experiments, but can be combined to one approach to activities and tasks as they arise in class.
A student can be flexible in their approach to many different problems, and call upon distinct skills as they do so. They can use divergent thinking to come up with many different possible solutions to a problem; they can use convergent thinking to flexibly combine different elements in a new way; they can use flexible thinking to not hold too tightly or rigidly onto any one possibility and make sure that they are open to suggestion - there could be more than one right answer to any acting or theater issue; they could use be flexible and when they have to perform a warm up in which they are switching tasks from jumping to clapping to turning around to skipping in one minute. All of these more specific downroad psychological skills- convergent thinking, divergent thinking, lack of rigidity, task switching come from a mindset of be flexible when given a task in an acting class.
All of these require an approach of psychological flexibility that gives the student a framework of engaging with the material of the classroom, but the possibility of multiple ways of doing so. Habits of mind across fields such as science, math, law, and visual arts, as well as in education research generally, are ways of organizing the approach students take to a problem, of putting resources from a variety of cognitive, social, and emotional skills to task, and focusing on using strategies to think about what they need to do in response to a teacher’s prompt.
In future research, tying the use of be flexible to known psychological outcomes like uncertainty tolerance (ability and willingness to not necessarily know the answer at the outset) and measures of divergent thinking (a form of creativity where you come up with many different responses to a prompt) will likely be a rich area of work. And some scientific research has already tied some types of theater to some types of uncertainty tolerance in the short term.
But using the Acting Habits of Mind as a framework to look at outcomes and elements of acting classrooms allows us to work from a mindset that combines the multiple possibilities of theatre with the reductionism and scientific thinking of psychology. And, hopefully, if that theatre scholar sees my work again, they will know that under the statistics, lies some truths about the richness of what students are learning and using in their theater classrooms.
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