Teaching Through Performing Arts in Higher Education: Examples in Engineering and Psychology

Abstract

This paper introduces two courses making use of performing arts at university level. The first course, taught by Prof. Simon Henein and his colleagues, called Improgineering, aims to teach collective creation through improvisation to master’s degree students in engineering at the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland). The second course, taught by Prof. Laure Kloetzer and her colleagues, aims to introduce the Psychology of Migration via a sociocultural approach to bachelor’s degree students in psychology and education at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). After briefly introducing the topic of performing arts in higher education (section 1), the paper offers a description of the two courses (sections 2 and 3). These are complemented by teachers’ and students’ impressions of the course, as analyzed from individual interviews, focus groups and students’ learning diary entries (section 4). The conclusion presents some reflections on the convergences of the pedagogical designs of the courses, drafting a pedagogical model for using performing arts within higher education (section 5).

Enacting Inner Speech on the Academic Stage. A Dialogical Review on Fossa, P. (Ed.). (2022). New Perspectives on Inner Speech. Springer

“…In the course of my work on this essay, I took part in the Pilot Workshop on Movement Improvisation for University Teachers in Lausanne (for context see Kloetzer et al, 2020). 8 There, in a small group of people, we were exploring ways to integrate performing arts knowledge and improvisation practices into academic teaching.…”

Teaching and learning online through performing arts: Puppetry as a pedagogical tool in higher education

“…These personal records of the content appropriation process gave an account, week after week, of the reflections, emotions and considerations that emerged. Hence, the diary represented a continuous process of reflection on their experience of the course (Kloetzer et al, 2020;Tau et al, 2021). These diaries provide first-person accounts of students' experiences of the course and allowed us to identify the U-shaped movement of reduction and expansion.…”

“…The theatre play forces the students to merge their theoretical understanding with the narratives of migration experiences reported in fiction books and with their own biographical experiences in a sociopolitical context. In other words, in this course, theatrical performance has a bridging function between theoretical notions, somewhat abstract or general, and the concrete, embodied and mobilising experiences to which literature and everyday life can lead (Kloetzer et al, 2020).…”

Performing arts as a tool for university education during a pandemic: Moving from an in vivo to an in vitro modality

“…Some notable examples include using drama to teach history (Taylor, 2008), archeology (Trimmis & Kalogirou, 2018), psychology (Kloetzer et al, 2020) or social science theory (Gravey et al, 2017); poetry to teach social workers (Parker, 2020); dance to teach engineers (Baudin, 2016) and nurses (Winther, 2015); performing arts in medicine education (Hooker & Dalton, 2019) or language teaching (Mentz & Fleiner, 2019). This article examines a university course on improvisation and collective creation, addressed to master's students of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland (Feraud et al, 2020;Kloetzer et al, 2020). This elective annual course, titled "Collective Creation: Improvised Arts and Engineering (Improgineering)", is open to all first-year master's students, with classes held once a week throughout the academic year.…”

“…During the second semester, students work in fixed groups of three to five, towards an improvised performance based on physical artifacts they have created. The task is to create a collective 12-minute performance, in which "all performers are physically present on stage during most of this duration; actions performed on stage are improvised; an artifact designed and realized by the students is present on stage; and the installation and removal of the artifact from the stage lasts less than 2 minutes to allow for the continuous presentation of all performances in a row" (Kloetzer et al, 2020).…”