Experiential Learning Theory as a Pedagogical Frame for Devising in the D12 Dreaming Project

Teaching theatre students is a unique opportunity to work with the next generation of storytellers and theatre artists. Teaching devising means enabling these storytellers with the skills and experience to create original performances without relying on a pre-written script. Devising provides opportunities for students to ‘develop artistically satisfying ways of working by stretching the limits of established practices’ (Govan et al. 2007: 3), while also allowing the ‘body and persona’ of the student artists to inform ‘both the measure of the imagery and the content of the performance’ (Heddon and Milling 2006: 62). When devising, we are learning to work and think dramaturgically about how meaning is communicated in performance through different combinations of dramatic and theatrical languages. This experimentation with the building blocks of performance (role, relationship, movement, mood, story, sound, design, etc.) enables a deep and embodied understanding of storytelling, which can inform and enhance students learning and ability in theatre studies more broadly. This chapter outlines two of the methods I applied in the devised D12Dreaming project facilitated at Flinders University (Adelaide, South Australia) with second-year undergraduate
students in the Drama Workshop programme in 2018. These methods were (1) classroom community building through engagement with theatrical languages in game playing, and (2) stimulus- and constraint-based small group devising tasks, incorporated primarily in the first six-weeks of the thirteen-week course to prepare and develop skills in devising. I engaged with the principles of Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) to inform the pedagogical facilitation of these two methods in the D12Dreaming project and researched the effectiveness of this approach through a reflective practitioner case study. My findings indicate that using ELT as a pedagogical frame for teaching devising enhances student learning outcomes, provides tangible practices to improve the facilitation of tasks and equips students with the skills to confidently engage in devising processes and share their stories through performance.