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…

Improvisation is a fundamental aspect of musicianship and an important pursuit in music education. Children in music classes throughout the world are engaged with improvisation in a variety of modes and settings. Whether singing, physically moving, or playing an instrument, the act of improvising in front of others may raise one's…

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…

This classroom-based action research explored the influence of creative engagement strategies-- a combination of Participation Squares and Spin-the-Wheel--on enhancing student engagement in a middle school classroom. The study was motivated by a recurring issue of poor student engagement. The intervention, used as a class starter to boost student…

This article explores how critical making - or a combination of critical thinking and making - could enhance and future-proof technical and vocational education and training (TVET). The article reports from a series of multi-stakeholder participatory workshops with educators, caretakers, pupils, and makers. The workshops themselves represent an…

This book invites the reader to think education against, beyond and without the school and its paraphernalia. To think about 'education', rather than schooling, and what kind of education is relevant to and needed now in the complex, difficult and dangerous world we live in. That invitation means testing our limits, questioning and changing…

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…

This study aims to assess personal creativity and the development of higher-order thinking skills in improvisation. The authors evaluated higher-order thinking skills in music improvisation and creativity of improvised musical compositions. The results of the t-test showed significant progress in both creativity and thinking skills among students…

"Radically Responsive Music Schools" is a philosophical reimagining of music higher education culture from the ground up, arguing that holistic cultural change is the key factor needed for music schools to prepare 21st-century graduates for contemporary challenges. The author discusses how university and conservatory music programs can…

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,…