Play is Serious Business Creative Pedagogy to Foster Critical Thinking
boss just left with his rants and ravens
going on and on about the hierarchies
he’s creating
about his obvious superiority
about his big lavish life
he sneers at my hopelessness
toast to my defeat
a nobody a nothing but clanging and
dangling these chains
you’ll never escape your buns you don’t
even have a brain
maybe he’s right but i have a feeling
he’s wrong
he’s poisoned my mind and made me think
these words true
but i don’t see a chain a link a lock or
a key
so who’s to say i’m in prison who’s to
say i’m free
now i see my way out a chance to abandon
these chains
now it’s time to take boss man and show
him
how to take life by the reins
martin luther king took up the fight for
civil rights
he just raised our consciousness to
dizzying new heights
he died as a martyr at the way to feel
good night
we know we are equal
stand up stand up are you repressed
stand up stand up are you repressed
stand up stand up are you repressed
we know we are equal
my heart heading on the horrors of me
company kind
convictions handle out like some deals
on groupon
every day at the last the wasted
downtime marathon
one day we shall be free
help us help us are you remembering
help us help us are you free man
help us help us are you free
one day we shall be home
true justice have no race religion
college in the class
we must gather all together bringing
empathy to past
teach the kids he loved each other to
the
very last one day we shall
be home and
don’t stand up are you all oppressed
stand up stand
one day we shall have peace
speak i’ll speak out are you all right
do you believe me when i tell you i was
tired as
and i thought about suicide daily in
that cramped cell
i caught myself daydreaming how things
used to be
seeing people in movies studying wish it
was me
making money telling lies whatever they
did with them stars in their eyes
claiming they true another day another
dollar the statement got for me
they keep fussing about their money when
they could have just set me free
another day another time
another day another situation enough
about me
enough about me
this is really deep i’m sorry
for the emotion
another day another dollar state they
made for me they keep fussing about
their money when they could just set me
free
enough of my situation same stuff
different day
and yet my kids i got their mom and i’m
all alone
i ain’t saying mom i won’t last long in
this twilight zone
it was hard and depressed
but i made it the lanes took me down
with them for the stuff they did and if
i was possible in the day and time
how did i serve time for something i
didn’t even do
where was my family when my soul was
drowning in pain the statement took my
name
replaced my pride with shame
so if i’m tripping i’m not tripping
about
what i went through i’m tripping by the
phases i went through
i’m tripping on
how i will not lose
i’m going to master this thing i’m not
about to lose
it’s like hotel california but it’s not
paradise
but could you tell me how did i get life
i’m wendy ballou i’m the executive
director of reforming arts
this is royal grooms this is janelle
davis
and this is gloria parks and they have
demonstrated
our program of
creative critical thinking or the
results of critical
creative critical thinking that was an
excerpt of a play
that was created in prison
after two years of studying the concepts
of utopia
which our students quickly discovered
was a lot of the concepts of utopia is
exactly what their lives are like
so i’m here to talk to you today
about play and how it helps us
foster creative critical thinking
but before i go into that i want to tell
you a little bit about who i am
and how i came to this conclusion i
entered the a prison for the first time
as a teacher
in october 2009
terrified i wasn’t terrified of the
students
or even of the place i was terrified
because i had never taught and i
hadn’t directed since i was in college
15 years prior
so i really felt like i was a little bit
of an imposter
sure i had my undergraduate in theater
but i had focused on stage management
and then i went into construction and
then i’m sorry and then i went
to grad school in business and then
i went into wealth management and then i
went back to grad school
in american studies so here i was
walking into a prison to teach a class
on acting
and i felt like a total poser
that first day i walked in
and i was escorted into the prison
and i set up the room
like what i felt like was like a very
big open setting
i set the tables up into a u
and there was a desk for the instructor
and so i set my stuff up so i could like
sit on the front of the desk so there
would be no
separation between me and the students
so and i had done my homework
i had talked to my friends that were
theater
teachers in high school and college
they’d give me things to read
they had given me some strategies they
told me
don’t worry it’ll be fine
and i had developed a class plan
it was a two-hour class and so
i was using a text that
described object put out objectives
describe the exercise step by step each
exercise step by step
into three steps and the author
explained these steps because he was
like based on
every class every theater class he had
ever taught
through all ages and demographics
this is how people react so
i felt pretty comfortable with that and
he so he set out the objectives
and then the step-by-step directions for
the instructor
and the reason for those directions was
because he was saying that
that all people respond
with nervousness and discomfort
and so he’s teaching the instructor how
to coach people through
that discomfort to get to pass through
their filters
so here i am first day
teaching inside a prison
that i had volunteered to do teaching an
acting class which i had never done
before
and i had a plan
nothing went as planned
as soon as i came in i start my
introduction
and a student says are you afraid of us
and i said no and i was thinking
well i wasn’t before
[Laughter]
and she said well you’re so far away
from us if you’re not afraid of us why
are you so far away
so what i had thought was me being very
open
and accessible was read by her as me
being
having distance between us
okay so then we finish our introductions
and i launched
into the exercises
and the students went straight to step
three
every time and i was smiling
and i was applauding them and i said oh
you’re so great and you’re so advanced
and i was thinking what is going on here
and why and i’ve spent the last 11 years
of my life
trying to answer that question what’s
going on here
and why over the years
the students oh well i’ll say
back to that first quarter that first
quarter
um we started with a script
that’s how i learned to do theater is
you start with a play and you learn
along the way
and the students came to me they elected
somebody to come to me and say
we don’t like the script we don’t want
to do this play
and it wasn’t the play itself that they
didn’t like they liked the theme
but they were uncomfortable with the
memorization
that first quarter that really that
first year we had a huge range
of literacy levels and educational
attainment
so i said okay we can throw out the
script and
we can do improvisation and apply
theater
the problem was i had never done
improvisation
or applied theater so once again i’m
hitting the books
trying to figure out what’s going on and
how to do this
and i did and throughout the years
we have worked on we’ve tried things
we’ve tried new things we’ve tried
things again and we have developed many
plays
some of them completely improvised some
of them scripted
and then acted out by the students
eventually we added other disciplines
first with humanities and eventually we
started a transdisciplinary college
program
so after many years
i added another question and that was
what are we trying to achieve here not
just in prison
not just in an acting class
but in education in general
and in society and i really think
that it comes down to trying to foster
creative
critical thinking and i’ve come to that
conclusion because i really believe
as fast as the world is moving as we’ve
heard
from our last two speakers and as much
as automation is increasing
every day in order to thrive
in the next decades people are going to
have to
have critical and creative thinking
skills they’re going to have to be able
to adapt
and they’re not going to want to be chat
right
so our program
focuses on six things
self-actualization consciousness raising
community building self-narrative
um empathy or compassion
and creative becoming
but at the core of all of this before we
can
even get there we have to build trust
and foster a sense of play
or play as a way of being
and when i’m talking about play i’m not
think talking about something you do
i’m talking about a way of being
so i’m not saying uh we’re going to play
a game
or we’re playing baseball i’m talking
about something
that we become we are
that is a part of us and opens us up
to understanding
the way that happens in a theater class
is that after many trust exercises
and many games that people kind of find
silly they
become they enter in to a sense of play
and it happens
when people no longer worry about
some what they’re going to say or do is
going to be
judged and when over the years i’ve
watched my own students
and other people
enter in that collectively into that
sense of play
or play as a way of being and when it
happens
you can you can feel the shift
in the room and when it happens
it becomes a part of who that person is
and when it happens then we can begin
and what i mean is that after that
moment
people are open to understanding they’re
open to learning in the prison setting
they’ve moved from survival mode
to actually trying to understand
the world beyond themselves we can
start building consciousness we can
start attacking
and having very hard discussions with
each other
and it crosses disciplines
so i’m not here to say that everybody
has to be a theater or art major
but i am saying that everyone needs to
be
exposed to those disciplines as well
as humanities and philosophy and
engineering and math and science
and that once we a person enters
into a sense of play as
being as the what part of their being it
goes across the disciplines
i don’t train our instructors to
start out with theater exercises in the
algebra class
i don’t need to because once the
students
have opened up to learning and
understanding it goes
with them i’m wendy blue thank you for
listening