BioArt "Keystone Training" for Teachers

-- A new performance-informed approach to classroom teacher training

BioArt Theatre Laboratories offers some vital tools to help address the challenges of teaching. By using leading edge performance training in modules adapted for their needs, teachers can learn how to work with their own nervous systems to create impact, find presence of mind, reduce stress and burn-out and sustain motivation.

A new perspective on a pervasive problem

Teachers today face numerous issues: chronic lapses in student attention span and ability to concentrate, as well as the challenge of integrating technology into the curriculum while maintaining quality and depth of contact. But teacher motivation is often further depleted by a sense of helplessness, and teacher training is often limited to protective academic programs, failing to address the fundamentals of communication.

BioArt Theatre Laboratories offers 6-hour workshops for teachers based on the same underlying principles as the training for actors and executives. Drama, performance, acting craft and our latest discoveries about the biology of performance can be harnessed to help classroom teachers and their students give more life and effectiveness to the teaching and learning experience.

From a biological perspective, drama/theatre is different from any other art form practiced by the human species. It can be perceived as a direct biological process, one that is perception-based and functions through the central nervous system. But, all other human performing behaviors can be seen from this same biological perspective, including the performance of teachers. (See video segment on mirror neurons, www.pbs.org/wgbh/#23E9EF )

What does this mean for the educator?

"The silence of the audience is not that of a public that listens but one that watches, like the dead hush that accompanies the unsteady movement of the tightrope walker poised over his perilous space."
-- from Charles Rosen's essay, "The Aesthetic of Stage Fright"

If even actors still experience the primal fear of being looked at, how much more true is this of the teacher in a classroom. But, the marvel of being in front of other live beings is that, by taking in the gaze of the watchers, being fully open and breathing it in, we can not only cause these watchers to unify into a responsive audience, but also actually cause neuronal growth in the brains of our audience. This "skill of 'taking gaze' " - so vital to communication and learning --can itself be learned.

Training the nervous system of the teacher - exactly as with the actor -- to receive and literally absorb the gaze of the audience through his or her own nervous system, can perform an important integrative function. The biologically-aware actor or teacher cycles
the attention of the audience through him/herself. Teachers will find that their - transmissible -- presence of mind, neuronal growth, added perspective and increased awareness of time and timing can bring about significant shifts in the quality of attention and learning of their students.

By training people of all ages in the basic biological foundations of theatre, as audience members or performers, we can strengthen the capacity to tune-in to the 'rhythm of circumstances', or even change that rhythm. For the teacher equipped with this training,
there is the promise of more fulfillment and greater positive power in the classroom.

"What it is you are searching after is serious and important and somewhere along the way you are going to startle us. I suspect that what you will startle us with is going to be small but absolutely precise. You will pin down some aspect of the interactive process that will make what is now foggy and generalized clear. I'm waiting for it."
-- Clive Barker, Author of THEATRE GAMES (Methuen), quoted here in 1992

"Respect is a key term for Madeleine's workshop. [This] reminds me of a quote by Mandela: 'There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.' In my case, as a professor, I have learned to become far more respectful of my own presence, and the presence of others, when speaking to students and colleagues. The results -a calmer sense of authority, and greater ease in conversation-have been immediate."
--- Karin Badt, Professor, Political Science, University of Paris