Cale Morrow continues this series on teaching and learning practices for leadership development. In this essay, Cale explores how educators can look to both contemporary leadership perspectives and theatre performance techniques to develop students’ social and emotional skills.
At the age of 17, I was asked to run a summer theatre camp for kids—nothing fancy, just a program offered to the public by a local dinner theatre in my hometown. We went about the usual theatre camp troupes, like line memorization tricks, costuming 101, and learning stage directions. We put on a short one act play by a first-time writer and everyone went home happy enough. From a theatre perspective, it was a 5/10 experience.
However, there was something other than basic theatre education that I observed while running this camp. I noticed that the participants began to perform better socially in the small group situations that the camp had created. They made friends quicker, spoke up more often when I asked a question, and developed a sense of confidence akin to someone ready to take on the world and whatever it had to throw at them. This change in the camp participants was my first experience with the positive impact of theatre techniques on a person’s social and emotional development.
A propensity toward social and emotional development skills is quickly becoming one of the abilities most sought after by employers in today’s work force. Understanding the unspoken elements of communication related to social and emotional intelligence gives young, working professionals on the hunt for post-college employment a large advantage. Teamwork, cultural understanding, reading the atmosphere of a room, and nonverbal communication are all examples of the types of skills needed for today’s job market (Tulgan, 2015). However, the ability to identify and define these skills and being able to develop and utilize them in everyday life are two very different things.
The question for educators becomes, “How do you teach social and emotional intelligence”? Young adults in today’s collegiate education system are experiencing a curriculum that lacks the necessary tools to address social and emotional development (Teng et al., 2019). It has been suggested that this leads to a generation that does not understand how to communicate with each other, which can lead to stress, burnout, isolation, and general unhappiness among students (Saha, 2019). Social and emotional skills are difficult to teach because they are contextual—their application varies based upon situations of individuals and groups. While social and emotional skills have basic tenets that encompass their application, they require a person to read between the lines of a situation; thus, there is no clear guide for their application (Dogara et al., 2020). To address the challenge of developing social and emotional skills, we can look to both contemporary leadership perspectives and theatre performance techniques.
Relational leadership
Many contemporary leadership perspectives focus on the need for adaptability, ways to navigate complex situations, and processes by which to discover and then solve complex issues (Ospina and Uhl-Bien, 2012). For example, relational leadership is a perspective focused on how people interact with each other and with aspects of their environment; thus, the idea of social and emotional development is key to successful leadership. One element of relational leadership is the idea of framing (Crevani, 2015). The directive of framing is to help put a situation into focus. There are defined agents, acting in a set location, that all have goals to accomplish. Those in a place of leadership have to be conscience of all of these elements and make decisions based in the context of the world around them (Crevini, 2015).
Another perspective of relational leadership suggests that individuals function in multiple roles. They can be either a leader or a follower, depending on the context of the situation. The duality of the roles that individuals are required to play can create multiple relationships with varying objectives. From this perspective, multiple leaders can exist within an organization, emerging when needed based on skillset and situational elements (Ospina and Uhl-Bien, 2012). Understanding these ideas of relational leadership gives a framework through which to help students understand social and emotional development. Once this framework has been established, theatre performance techniques can be used to teach real life applicability.
Youth particpants in the Dodge City Depot Theatre Children’s Summer Camp, including Cale Morrow, pictured far right, discuss theatre basics. 2012
Theatre performance
Playing action verbs
The relational leadership process described above is incredibly similar to a theatre concept known as playing action verbs. In theatre performance, it is a rule that to create a good performance, an actor must know the context of the world in which their character exists. Location has to be analyzed in every scene. They must consider the hopes, wants, and dreams of their character as well as all the other characters they encounter. Objectives have to be determined on a line-by-line basis, and appropriate actions chosen in relation to said objectives. All actions should be chosen in a playable form (e.g., to convince, to intimidate, to encourage) so that the desired outcome is clear and achievable (Rees and Staniunas, 2002). Essentially, playing action verbs require an actor to understand the world of the play around them and make decisions that are rooted in moving forward to a solution.
A developmental approach
Integrating relational leadership practices with the action verbs that Rees and Staniunas advocate for leads to a new approach for teaching social and emotional development. Consider the following teaching activity: Students are asked to participate in a roleplaying scenario. They are given a script and assigned characters to play. The characters will be having some sort of conflict. Students will read through the scene twice. The first read through will happen immediately and students will be given no prep time to analyze the script. Once this first reading is completed, ask students to analyze the text and determine the world in which the scene takes place, the wants of the characters, etc. before the second reading. Encourage them to think of their objectives in terms of framing and the various roles that someone might hold in a modern-day leadership setting.
After the second reading, ask students to talk about the differences in their experiences between the first reading and the second. How did having clearly defined objectives change their interactions? Did they feel more prepared for the conflict being discussed after taking time to analyze the script? Participants think of the “scene” in which they find themselves and structure their actions through a forward thinking, outcome focused lens. Framing provides real world context, while understanding that there are multiple roles to perform in a modern leadership world helps participants to better understand their place in said context. Thinking of things from the theatre performance centered action verb approach allows participants to create solutions that have wide ranging, easily applicable impacts that account for the wants and needs of all involved.
This is just a small example of the possibilities for education that this combined theatre/leadership approach allows. Through further analysis, a new type of curriculum for teaching students social and emotional development skills can be created, solving the initial problem of a lack of an educational process through which to help students learn said concepts.
References
Crevini, L. (2015) Relational leadership. In B. Caroll, J. Ford, and S. Taylor (Eds.). Leadership: Contemporary critical perspectives (pp. 188-211). Sage.
Dogara, G., Saud, M., Sukri B. K., Yusri, B., and Nordin, M. S. B. (2020). Project-Based learning conceptual framework for integrating soft skills among students of technical colleges. IEEE Access,8, 83718-83727.
Opsina, S. M., and Foldy, E. G. (2016). Collective dimensions of leadership. In A. Farazmand (Ed.), Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance (pp. 1-6). DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5 2202-1
Rees, M. and Staniunas, J. (2002). Between director and actor. Portsmouth, NH. Heinemann
Saha, P. (2012). Conflict coaching: A tool for conflict resolution in schools. James Cook University Law Review, 19, 126.
Teng, W., Ma, C., Pahlevansharif, S., and Turner, J. J. (2019). Graduate readiness for the employment market of the 4th industrial revolution. Education and Training (London), 61(5), 590-604.
Tulgan, B. (2015). Bridging the soft skills gap: How to teach the missing basics to ’ ’today’s young talent.
Cale Morrow is a first-year student in the Leadership Communication PhD program at Kansas State University. He is also a GTA and assistant forensics coach for the K-State Communication Studies Department. He has been a fan of theatre performance for as long as he can remember, and he looks forward to continuing to find new ways to bring this passion to his research.
