How can we bring joy into education?
Johanna Smith, professor of theater education and entrepreneurship at California State University, San Bernardino, finds a way to incorporate it.
Johanna Smith is a Professor of Theatre Education and Entrepreneurship at California State University, San Bernardino. She has served as an artist and educator for professional theatres, museums, colleges, libraries, public schools, private schools, and preschools around the world. She is a frequent presenter on puppetry as an accessible and powerful tool for educators and is the author of the award winning education text Puppetry in Theatre and Arts Education: Head, Hands, and Heart (Methuen Drama/Bloomsbury, London). She is also very proud of the improv curriculum she created and teaches for CSUSB’s Randall W. Lewis School of Entrepreneurship.
Finding the Courage to Demand Delight
Creative, authentic teaching requires a bit of chaos, and that sort of trust of teachers and support of artists in the schools has been a bit lacking in our current world. Imagining and pretending are learning instincts that allow children to explore possibilities and dreams that can make the world a better place. If we provide all the answers to children on a screen, they will miss out on the fun and joy of discovering life’s problems for themselves.
Teachers can tap these instinctive impulses through the arts. Puppetry is perhaps the most rich art form as it is an interdisciplinary combination of all of the arts. Visual art, drama, movement, and music, lighting, space design, live performance – it’s all there. Puppetry fosters silliness, true collaboration, and just the right amount of anarchy to be irresistible to all ages.
One of the most important inherent lessons of puppetry is creative transformation. Instead of throwing things out, what other potential can you see in the material? How else can you use it? This kind of thinking is desperately needed as we search for ways to create a sustainable world. Making and using puppets can develop fundamental skills that lay the groundwork for more sophisticated creative skills and mastery. That’s the kind of stuff that will help kids have a happier life, and build their own futures.
So what can we do? One big thing is to listen to educators and empower them to do their jobs the way they know best. The other thing is to look at the evidence we are collecting from cognitive science about how we learn. The simplest thing we can do is trust children and their instincts. Give them some inspiration, and then let them do things for themselves.
Read More:
[CSUSB] – CSUSB Theatre Arts Department brings joy and connection to young audiences through puppetry
