Baker Sennett Matusov School Performa

chapter 9

School “Performance”:
Improvisational Processes in
Development and Education*
JacQue!yn Baker-Sennett
University of British Columbia
Eugene Matusov
University of California, Santa Cruz

Dr. Baker-Sennett and Dr. Matusov study the development of planning skills.
With Barbara Rogoff and others, they have studied the collective improvisational skills that children employ while developing puppet and other theatrical performances. In this chapter, they describe this “playcrafting” work, and extend their discussion to emphasize a variety of ways that improvisational performances unfold in classrooms.
Classroom interactions are often improvisational encounters, and the teacher often acts as a sort of performer. But the application of performance to educational settings goes beyond the notion of “teacher as performer.” Rather, contemporary research in education focuses on the beneJits of collaborative, participatory learning, in which the students take an active role, in rich unstructured interactions with both the teachers and with other students. In this view, the classroom is a “community of learners.” In this type of learning environment, the researcher must consider the joint performances of all of the participants, not only the teacher. A collaborating group can be considered to be conducting an improvised performance, since such interactions are not structured in advance.

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*This article is a revision and expansion of ideas presented in Baker-Sennett, J. (1995).
Improvisation, planificacion y el proceso creative (Improvisation, planning, and the creative process), Infancia y aprendizaje, 70, 111-126. We would like to thank Barbara Rogoff for helpful suggestions on this paper and for her guidance and collaborative support.
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The authors review a wide range of contemporary research on improvisational classrooms and on teaching as improvisation. For example, they argue that experienced teachers use a more

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