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The concept of bricolage was formulated by Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind to provide an analogy for how mythical thought works. In the following decades, scholars have frequently deployed the concept, not only in anthropology, but also in sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Inheriting Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, French-speaking scholarship has tended to emphasize the structural patterns or constraints of bricolage, while English-speaking scholars have shown more interest in the individuality, subjectivity, or contingency of bricolage. This article seeks to integrate the merits of both strands of scholarships, transcend the collectivist/individualistic divisions, and develop bricolage into a multidimensional concept: Bricolage is a generative principle of regulated improvisation responding to restrictive or limited conditions. My ethnographic study of Kitchen God worship in one region of China shows that the entire process of creating bricolage is an individual embodiment of collective structure. Although bricolage is a product of structure intended to reproduce the structure, it can occasionally affect or change the structure. Thus, it is an important micro mechanism for culture change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the case of the COVID-19 lockdown as a disruptive event, this article aims to show the paradox of improvisation by investigating students' experiences of transitioning from in-person to digital learning spaces across three select business schools in Pakistan. Using Foucault, we analyse the discursive strategies deployed by students as they oscillate between different subject positions under improvised digital conditions. Our analysis reveals contradictory views about the agency of the improvised subjects which is often considered as enterprising in the sense that individuals are willing agents of change. Findings suggest that improvisation can also be paradoxically experienced as it misaligns with predispositions of agents. We show this through the struggles of students in getting to grips with the digital move, giving rise to uncertainty. This study, therefore, makes three distinct, yet interrelated, contributions to the literature on management learning by identifying: the risks of taming embodied subjectivities, the changing positionality of learners and the paradox of improvisation. Our work has implications for understanding improvisation in business schools during disruptive events, as overlooking the predispositions of students can lead to an enterprising agency of a different kind (e.g. resistance) that forfeits the purpose of improvisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effectiveness of improvisation in creative thinking development in dance education. The study used the experimental method, which implies conducting a survey and identifying the level of creative thinking development. The following methods were used to study the level of creativity: the Reisman Diagnostic Assessment of Creativity method, Assessment of the creative potential of an individual, The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). The study was conducted at the School of Music and Dance at Hunan First Normal University. A total of 561 students participated in the study. The findings show there is a statistically significant (p <.05) difference between the students' self-assessment of creativity and their level of creativity, instructors' selected expertise, knowledge level, professional competencies and skills as the primary criteria. The results of the pre-test and post-test show that the indicators of the high level increased from 51% to 61%, and the average level from 27% to 34%. Low-level indicators, on the contrary, decreased from 12% to 5%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article maps affective operations in artful teaching practices in Social Education at a University College in Denmark to make visible the ways affect shapes experience, behavior, and forms of social connection. The article contributes to the fields of playful learning and aesthetic learning in higher education through its application of a relational and situated approach to affectivity as a new line of inquiry illuminating the dynamics of affect in artful educational practices. We argue that bringing considerations of affectivity to the study of artful educational practices utilized as a catalyst for playful learning in Social Education has: (1) important implications for how we might leverage the affective power of bodies learning together (Harris, Jones, 2021) for designing and developing inclusive playful learning encounters; (2) important implications for how we might better understand the exclusive dynamics and micropolitical dimensions of aesthetic practices in order to better respond to the inherent power structures and nuanced nature of privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of musical improvisation in the development of creative thinking in children studying at Harbin No. 3 Secondary School (Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China). The creative thinking of two groups (experimental and control) was examined through pre- and post-tests aimed at musical creativity measurement and assessing the effectiveness of musical improvisation in the development of musical creativity. The post-test mean and standard deviations of each musical creativity factor in the experimental group showed an increase in four factors: musical extensiveness (by 65%), musical flexibility (by 37%), musical originality (by 34%) and musical syntax (by 42%). All correlations between the MCTM factors were significant (p <.01), demonstrating that the four factors are representative of creative thinking. The research is of practical and scientific significance as it proves the factor of the influence of musical improvisation on the development of creative skills in children. The research results can be applied by schools and other educational institutions that are interested in increasing the indicators of creativity of their students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article relies on nonrepresentational narrative research to consider improvisational urban literacy. The author uses narrative to theorize the choice to teach Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in urban high school English classrooms. The author positions this decision as the surprising result of an improvisational, urban literacy pedagogy meant to locate and address issues of race and gender in a video game. This article calls for a broader view of textuality that affirms, supports, and celebrates emergent teacher decision making, as well as practices of urban literacy education that broaden the notion of what constitutes a text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of a beginning jazz improvisation learning environment for middle school instrumentalists, including whether one of two instructional sequences of harmonic form improvisation tasks better supported four outcomes: achievement, self-assessment, self-efficacy, and motivation. Over 12 weeks, fifth- to eighth-grade instrumentalists (n = 43) studied jazz improvisation in a learning environment with four critical features: (a) forming cooperative jazz combos, (b) making jazz thinking visible, (c) encouraging specific feedback, and (d) implementing harmonic form sequencing. Quantitative data for all outcomes were collected pre-, mid-, and postinstruction. Primary findings showed: (a) a significant effect on all outcomes over time, not only for the 12-week duration of the instructional period but even in the first 6 weeks; (b) a significant interaction between assessed task (i.e., a modal- or blues-based improvisation) and achievement; (c) evidence of transfer of learning when, midinstruction, participants significantly improved at both tasks after only studying one; and (d) no significant effect according to instructional sequence of harmonic form (i.e., modal/blues vs. blues/modal). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is a consensus that it is important to teach jazz and the skill of improvisation inherent within it, many feel unprepared to do so. This article presents a simple way for beginners to improvise through the blues scale and harmonic progression at any present skill level in kindergarten through high school general music coursework. This practical method addresses the Creating pillar of the 2014 Music Standards while enhancing students' and instructors' musical skills and leadership skills, and presenting an avenue for live performance. Teachers and students alike can feel empowered to learn jazz improvisation with the "correct notes" provided through these friendly steps that I have been using in my own teaching for over 15 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global COVID-19 pandemic made salient various paradoxical tensions, such as the trade-offs between individual freedom and collective safety, between short term and long-term consequences of adaptation to the new conditions, the power implications of sameness (COVID-19 was non-discriminatory in that all were affected in one way or another) and difference (yet not all were affected equally due to social differences), whereas most businesses became poorer under lockdown, others flourished; while significant numbers of workers were confined to home, some could not return home; some thrived while working from home as others were challenged by the erosion of barriers between their private and working lives. Rapid improvisational responding and learning at all levels of society presented itself as a naturally occurring research opportunity for improvisation scholars. This improvisation saw the arrival of a 'New Normal', eventually defined as 'learning to live with COVID-19'. The five articles in this special issue capture critical aspects of improvisation, paradoxes and power made salient by the COVID-19 pandemic in contexts ranging from higher-education, to leadership, to medical care and virtue ethics. In their own ways, each breaks new ground by contributing novel insights into improvisation scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has caught most organizations off guard. They have had to adapt their operations rapidly, and with the pandemic persisting, continuously improvise. While such an external jolt to organizations might unsettle operations, it does not remove the fact that organizations are sites of power relations and political activity. In this article, we examine the influence of power and politics on learning from improvisation, through a qualitative longitudinal case study of an Australian university during COVID-19. We trace improvisations with the use of the social media platform WeChat, which was eventually adopted, after several changes in forms of improvisation, as part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study contributes to the literature on learning from improvisation, and explains how different forms of improvisation morph into one another under the simultaneous influence of power relations and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified and exacerbated organizational paradoxes felt by individuals largely because of the nostalgia individuals feel for the "old" normal while facing the need to let go in order to create a "new" normal. We position improvisation as a synthesis-type approach to working through the paradoxes of the pandemic. Furthermore, we look at individual differences that underpin the ability to improvise, and identify that it is the strength of character and character-based judgment of the individual that enables the enactment of a focal context, the choice to improvise, and the act of effectively improvising to work through paradoxes. Linking character to improvisation, and, vice versa, improvisation to the development of character, reveals the importance of dimensions such as courage, humility, temperance, transcendence, humanity, and collaboration in the practice of improvisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite rich depictions of paradox navigation strategies, and the recognition that they are fraught with uncertainty, research reveals relatively little about how leaders navigate paradoxical tensions when improvising in the face of highly unpredictable and quickly evolving events. We conducted a narrative study of how French President Macron navigated the tension between the paradoxical poles of "saving lives" and "preserving life as usual" during the pandemic. Our article surfaces three central elements that form a model of improvised paradox navigation in stormy conditions: turning points, fog of uncertainty, and chaotic learning. Our model contributes to paradox theorizing by shedding light on paradox navigation in highly turbulent environments and has implications for management learning and improvisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mainstream literature on welfare retrenchment, austerity and post-welfare states proposes that since the mid 1970s, welfare states are in a state of ‘permanent austerity’. To offer an alternative to such stories of loss and their problematic nostalgic retelling of recent European history, leaving out its imperial histories, this article proposes to look instead at welfare as the object of ruination. This approach builds on literatures that focus on the experience of austerity and institutional violence to take a step further towards everyday responsive practices. Building on the work of Ann Laura Stoler, studying ruination and debris opens up the possibility to look at (1) the long durée of the colonial heritage of welfare, (2) ruination as an active and violent process and (3) welfare debris and how European dwellers use it and live in it. For Europeans, living amidst ruins and in a time of ruination, then, the question is: how can they build a life with the welfare debris that they are left with? Who is able to navigate the ruins and who is not? For researchers, this perspective can inform a new research agenda: a redirection of attention from welfare as ‘organized provision’ to, instead, how people organize the provisional, improvising with the rubble that remains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Market entry performance is critical during internationalisation; prevailing views suggest that firms need to carefully plan their entry before putting the plan into action. This article focuses on three attributes affecting the possibility and usefulness of making a pre-planned market entry: unpredictability, improvisation and business network commitment. We develop six hypotheses tested on a sample of 250 entries; our main finding is that improvisation plays a mediating role in relation to performance in unpredictable markets. The analysis reveals that the relationship between unpredictability and network commitment is not significant, while the effect of unpredictability on market entry performance is negative. These findings suggest implications for internationalisation and international entrepreneurship theory. For managers and entrepreneurs, we show that unpredictability weakens market entry performance, a negative effect that can be mitigated if the entrant firm improvises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies in musical improvisation show that musicians and even children are able to communicate intended emotions to listeners at will. To understand emotional expressivity in music as an art form, communicative success needs to be related to improvisers' thought processes and listeners' aesthetic judgments. In the present study, we used retrospective verbal protocols to address college music students' strategies in improvisations based on emotion terms. We also subjected their improvisations to expert ratings in terms of heard emotional content and aesthetic value. A qualitative analysis showed that improvisers used both generative strategies (expressible in intramusical terms) and imaginative, extramusical strategies when approaching the improvisation tasks. The clarity of emotional communication was found to be high overall, and linear mixed-effects models showed that it was supported by generative approaches. However, perceived aesthetic value was unrelated to such emotional clarity. Instead, aesthetic value was associated with emotional complexity, here defined as the heard presence of "nonintended" emotions. The results point toward a view according to which the expressive content of improvisation gets specified and personalized during the very act of improvisation itself. Arguably, musical expressivity in improvisation should not be equated with the error-free communication of previously intended emotional categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explain how percussion and groove are at the core of many musics created and enjoyed today, yet they can be overlooked in music teaching and learning. A pervasive culture of pitched-instrument prejudice makes it difficult to take rhythm and groove seriously, although these can be at the core of meaningful music-making experiences in schools. I provide an original, flexible composition for nonpitched percussion, with easy-to-follow instructions and video demonstration. The article invites teachers to consider embracing an engaging, Afrological approach to making music that emphasizes feel and groove. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors investigate works by four composers who employed technology in the creation of music employing audification, sonification and algorithmic composition techniques. These compositions involve interdisciplinary collaborations either with scientific researchers, in the case of Annea Lockwood's Dusk and Carla Scaletti's hàgg, or artificial intelligence, in George Lewis's Voyager, and Bob Sturm's The Waters of Heanny. Each composer's choice of input data, custom-designed tools and personal compositional processes result in unique, expressive works that challenge the listener to expand their view of music and reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has identified improvisation as a creative and open activity that can be harnessed to encourage innovation and learning within the organization. In this paper, we present improvisation as a covert phenomenon, occurring in a climate of mistrust and fear of censure, and disconnected with wider organizational learning. Drawing on qualitative evidence of a Fire Service in the United Kingdom, we explore hidden improvisation, and identify the conditions and processes that can connect these local deviations to wider processes of learning. We show that while most improvisations remain hidden and contained to avoid wider scrutiny, certain conditions of frequency, connectedness and scale escalate events to become more visible to supervisors and managers. The learning outcomes from these visible improvisations will then depend on management's interpretation, evaluation and translation of improvising behaviours. Dependent on prior relationships of trust and credibility, middle management perform a key brokering role in this process, connecting previously hidden improvisation to wider organizational systems and structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this historical study, I present the emergence and evolution of Jamey Aebersold's Play-A-Long volumes and their key role in bringing jazz improvisation to formal music education. Drawing on oral histories and using a framework from sound studies, I present chord-scales and pattern playing as Deweyan conceptual technologies that assist beginners in developing a mature technique. I recount how Aebersold learned these as a student of David Baker at Indiana University, then applied the idea through teaching improvisation with the Dorian mode over Davis's "So What." In 1967 Aebersold published volume 1, and the Play-A-Long evolved into a system over a dozen years as subsequent volumes included new scale types, like the blues scale; added idiomatic patterns; incorporated his new Scale Syllabus; and licensed standard repertoire. I then describe how these technologies imply the "soloist as such": a generic model of learning improvisation as a process of learning tunes and tasks from simple to complex around a core unity of theory and performance. This model in particular addressed beginning improvisation and the slogan "Anyone Can Improvise." Finally, I consider criticisms of the model, note that the chord-scale approach is Black music theory, and suggest future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a tendency in animation studies to discuss sound in the language of images, stressing sound's alignment with visual cues (as in mickey mousing and leitmotifs). But sounds do not only mimic images: they add textures and emotions that change what we see. This article explores grain (texture) and timbre (tone color produced by specific instruments and techniques) as qualities shared by visual and sonic material. To do so, the author closely reads Sand or Peter and the Wolf (1969), where Caroline Leaf's haptic sand animation is matched by Michael Riesman's electroacoustic score. Leaf painstakingly molds animals by scraping away individual sand grains, and Riesman sculpts sonic textures with tiny adjustments to knobs and touch-sensitive pads on the Buchla modular synthesizer. Their collective improvisation with sands and sounds reveals new ways to think about artists' material practices and the friction and interplay between images and sounds. They encourage spectators to perceive the animals as not merely plasmatic, or Sergei Eisenstein's notion of contour-bending character animation. Instead, Leaf and Riesman deploy what the author calls 'granular modulation', expressing sand and animals with sensuous materiality. In Leaf's and Riesman's improvisations, grainy textures are the seeds of understanding how sound and vision become symbiotic - and encounter friction - in animation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the challenging consequences of dementia is the change in relationships that can co-occur with the progression of this condition. Despite this well-documented change, few arts-based interventions target the relational dimension of dementia. This study aims to explore the effects of one arts-based relational intervention: a movement program designed to foster connections within a group of persons with dementia. We used ethnographic methods—including participant observations and informal interviews—to understand the relational effects of this program conducted by two dancers and a musician. The movement sessions were video recorded, and participant movement trajectories were analyzed for different ways in which they created connections. We identified two types of connections—nonreciprocal and reciprocal—and four subtypes of connections—connection to exercise/music, connection to participant, interpersonal connection, and group connection—that participants engaged in during the movement program. Despite most participants not remembering the previous movement sessions, they experienced increasing numbers of connections over the course of the program, particularly reciprocal interpersonal connections. Participants explored new forms of moving and creatively transformed the movement structures proposed by the dancers. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of this program in augmenting connections and fostering exploration and creativity in individuals with dementia, providing a template for further developments of interventions targeting the relational dimensions of dementia. This study also highlights the potential of combining ethnographic methods and video analysis to include the perspectives of persons with dementia in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses an examination of prefigurative politics – popularly imagined as 'being the change you wish to see' – to reflect on geographies of the future. We argue that prefigurative politics, which has become common since the mid-1990s, typically proceeds through multiple forms of improvisation. Successful prefigurative politics is usually institutionalised within organisations and movements and reshapes practices, discourses, and structures of power. We demonstrate how a focus on prefigurative politics can inform scholarship on the 'anticipatory politics' associated with dominant institutions and geographies of the future more broadly by highlighting ways in which people seek to enact visions of the future and illustrating the impact of these oppositional practices of future making. We argue that prefigurative politics could be a springboard for investigating means-ends alignment as a characteristic of political action and the present as a terrain of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adjusting to life in a long term care facility (LTCF) can be challenging for older adults. Improvisation (shortened to improv) is a unique activity that encourages creativity and adaptive cognitive stimulation, through performing short scenes with content suggestions. We sought to assess whether improv training, in the form of a course entitled Humor Doesn't Retire (HDR), could impact patient-centered outcomes in a LTCF. About 15 adults (mean age 83.6 years) living in a LTCF participated in the 8-week HDR course with pre and 1-month post mixed method surveys assessing validated Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) measures and qualitative open-ended responses. Participants experienced significant improvements in social isolation and perceived stress (p <.05), and trend improvements in positive affect, self-efficacy, and anxiety. Participants described themes of increased attentiveness, becoming more relaxed, increased cognitive stimulation, and improved communication skills. In conclusion, LTCFs may want to consider offering improv training to positively improve the lives of older adult residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the historical phenomenon of truces, as these occurred during a period of intense warfare during World War I, around Christmas 1914. These were processes of resistance that could not have been planned (otherwise they would obviously have been thwarted by authority) and that occurred in a setting with continuously changing conditions. Our purpose in making this analysis is to identify the micro-foundations and behaviours of enacting resistance and forming a truce under conditions where planning and executing cannot be assumed to be orderly and linear. We discuss the battlefield context of intense competition and mutual suffering as an organizational setting in order to provide a more precise explanation of how rules and structures can be (at least) temporarily suspended in the workplace. We rethink the construct of resistance as an act of improvisation; we do so by developing a framework that explains how resistance can emerge and be quashed in workplace settings that might appear at first sight to be immune. Therefore, we combine two themes that have largely been separated in theory: resistance and improvisation. Doing so opens new ground in three ways. First, we contribute to literature about resistance by explaining how it was constructed as action suspending rules and structures in hostile contexts. Second, we show the political-motivational dimension of improvisation. Third, we extend the notion of truce as not an end in itself (a temporary settlement) but as an avenue to achieve a real objective (e.g. to change the course of history for the better). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analyst's embodied attunement and participation arises within an embodied analytic relationship. Understanding this "deep structure" of the interaction and attention to this level of interaction opens up new modes of engagement and therapeutic action. The importance of embodied attunement is supported by recent research and theories that the developing mind is shared and dialogical through bodily communication, by rhythms of cadence, tone, intensity, and movement. The analyst's embodied awareness of two bodies together and their interpersonal rhythm is the "tool" used to gauge the pulse, vitality of connection, and particular rhythmic qualities of a uniquely shared world. This provides a read on the most elemental way the dyad shares emotional experience (or fails to). The analyst's embodied participation is interpretation in another mode. Clinical examples illustrate how embodied attunement and intentional participation work in the session, and their therapeutic effect. Failures of attunement are also discussed in terms of how the analyst recognizes these failures and his internal process of reattunement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses improvisation as a liminal practice of inhabiting the in-between that marks urban spaces from squats and brownfields to communal gardens, from infrastructural maintenance and urban living labs to political protest and solidarity in times of crisis. It shows how improvisation emerges in the interstices between uncertain flux and ossified rigidities to construct in-between spaces of ambiguous political openings even in ostensibly formal, rigid contexts. To that end, it draws on documents, media reports, interviews and participant observation to analyse the multiple mutations of what eventually became the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Centre in Ekaterinburg, a cultural flagship in Russia's third largest city. Morphed from an abandoned office block into a memorial multi-purpose complex, the Yeltsin Centre is the product of elites and ordinary people responding to conjunctural openings in seemingly inert structures. While highlighting the political openings made possible by improvisation inhabiting the in-between, the paper also underscores the ambiguous nature of this practice and its limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report on modern politicians in the Netherlands. Topics discussed here include intimate bond between the profession of politics and the art of rhetoric, the professionalization of political life, and modern social science knowledge from economics and psychology to game-theory or opinion-polling.

In an era of constant connectedness—from Twitter tweets to the 24-hour news cycle—the need for marketers to be nimble and responsive to the needs of consumers and ever-evolving markets is greater than ever before. Indeed, being able to be "in the moment" and to react instantaneously demands a different kind of training and education than the slower paced, carefully constructed, and casually timed marketing campaigns of yesterday. Improvisational comedy and its tenets—agreement ("Yes, and... "); be you (and know that you are enough); make bold, unexpected choices—require a comparable, in-the-moment mind-set that encourages group collaboration, positive self-efficacy, and the ability to generate creative ideas without hesitation. Two studies show that improvisational training has positive consequences for group collaboration, self-efficacy, and divergent thinking, skills essential for modern marketing roles. First, an exploratory study of the general population reveals preliminary links between improvisation familiarity and the aforementioned marketing skills, as well as between a brief improv manipulation and divergent thinking. Second, a follow-up study using actual students in a 10-week improvisation course confirms causal relationships between long-term improv training and group collaboration, self-efficacy, and divergent thinking. Effect sizes are large and endure even 4 months following the improv training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminists witness legal worlds as they observe, document and share nothing less than the reproduction of life itself. The world of the abortion trail, where people and things move across borders to change life's reproduction, has generated a rich variety of legal sources, figures and objects for feminist witnessing. In watching how feminist activists improvise with sources, figures and objects of legal consciousness on the abortion trail, this article seeks to contribute to critical understanding of a plurality of witnessing practice, particularly as it emerges in diaspora space. Focusing on Murphy's concept of immodest witnessing, with its attention to bodies, protocols and apparatuses as constituents of knowledge, the article thinks with the diasporic feminist performance group, Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A., about how they used self-examination, collaboration and knowledge-sharing on the trail to repeal Ireland's 8th Amendment. The article argues that their improvisation with legal consciousness of reproductive choice enacts 'cheeky witnessing'. Cheeky witnessing has three dynamics as a method of observation. First, it is messy and irreverent in innovating with names to display the mixed genealogies of feminist knowledge. Second, cheeky witnessing generates novel subject-figures who make connections between different reproductive labourers as observers of the trail in diaspora space. Third, cheeky witnessing places funny objects, knickers in this instance, so as to join up particular public locations and make them more, if unevenly, comfortable for sexual and reproductive bodies. Cheeky witnessing shows us how committed and partial practices play a role in speaking across interests and experiences, in stretching the legal imagination and in sustaining the everyday grind of making a better world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a study combining methodological elements from cognitive psychology and social anthropology, we worked with professional contemporary dancers making choreographic movement material to investigate the effects of working with others during improvisation. Dancers improvised alone, in pairs, and in a trio, they self-reported the number of new movement ideas created within two and four minutes, and self-rated ease, interest, originality, and clarity. Within two minutes, higher ratings were assigned in the unfamiliar pair than the familiar pair condition but there was no effect of group size on the number of ideas created. Within four minutes, more ideas were created in the solo condition than the pair condition with no effect of group size on ratings. Open-ended responses suggested that the quality and relevance of the ideas increased in the duo and the trio conditions. The conclusions point to emergent aspects of relations between persons as fundamental to creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improvisation is a fundamental aspect of musicianship and an important pursuit in music education. Children in music classes throughout the world are engaged with improvisation in a variety of modes and settings. Whether singing, physically moving, or playing an instrument, the act of improvising in front of others may raise one's self-consciousness, potentially leading to feelings of fear and anxiety. We wish to share guiding principles for improvisation to alleviate many of the associated fears. The establishment of a classroom improvisation culture may breed willful participation and acceptance. When willful participation and acceptance become habitual, the goal of establishing a safe space for students to explore their musical creativity is more readily achieved. A manifestation of the guiding principles is shared in the form of two model improvisation experiences for the general music classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that exploratory experiences in the music classroom are a crucial developmental stage as students begin making the kinds of decisions required of them during composition and improvisation. The aims of this article are to (1) articulate a rationale for exploratory learning experiences in the music classroom and (2) outline practical strategies for using exploration as a foundation for compositional and improvisational development. Drawing on the research of Peter Webster, John Kratus, and Maud Hickey, this article outlines group and individual strategies for setting up a listening walk, introducing students to invented notation, scaffolding exploratory learning experiences in the classroom, and provides resources for extending these lessons into composition and improvisation instruction. Embedding exploration into the music classroom empowers students to develop the mental flexibility, disposition, and skills needed for improvising and composing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research investigating links between academic achievement and active music instruction has not previously differentiated between different types of instruction. In the current study, 155 seventh- and eighth-grade middle school band students were divided into two groups. Both groups received 2 months of instruction in jazz phrasing, scales, and vocabulary, but only the experimental group was taught to improvise. All instruction was part of the warm-up routine in regular band classes. All students were tested before and after instruction on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (cognitive flexibility) and the classic Stroop task (inhibitory control). At posttest, eighth-grade students in the experimental group scored significantly better on cognitive flexibility with a smaller percentage of perseverative errors, whereas the treatment had no effect on seventh-grade students on this outcome. Seventh graders, but not eighth graders, in the experimental group increased their posttest scores for inhibitory control, though this result was only marginally significant. In relation to previous research, the current results strongly suggest that far-transfer effects of active music participation depend on the nature of the instruction. Results of prior and future studies should therefore be interpreted in light of the type of music-making engaged by participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional coaching methods position coaches at the centre of the learning process and do not encourage players to think creatively. This study challenged this assertion, through the application of pedagogical principles reported in jazz-related literature, which argue that creativity is best developed through collaboration. As such, the study aimed to develop players' creativity, through the application of pedagogical principles reported in jazz-related literature. An action research design was implemented, during a 14-weeks period, with a youth volleyball squad. Results demonstrated an impact upon match play; players showed their enhanced appreciation of the game's complexity, by experimenting, collaborating, and generating creative solutions to challenges emerging within matches. In addition, the implementation of collaborative practices positively impacted upon the players' communication habits, which were both more frequent and effective. Although players demonstrated a similar modus operandi to jazz musicians, this study represents the first step in what coaches can learn from jazz creativity, and therefore further research is required to corroborate or challenge the results attained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this self-study of teacher education practices was to examine and improve improvisation and composition teaching practices for three university professors at the same institution. Primary data sets were individual researcher journals and transcripts of seven researcher meetings. Secondary data sets were music major surveys, interviews, observations, and written communications. Findings are discussed in three sections: origins of our insecurities, turning point realizations and conversations, and our changed teaching practices and students' learning. With the encouragement and support of our coresearchers, each of us experienced greater success in regularly integrating improvisation and composition into our teaching, which yielded notable increases in our students' confidence and skills when improvising and composing, as well as willingness to incorporate them into their own teaching. We noticed improved student learning in many areas, as well as a more sophisticated transference of knowledge between playing, reading, and writing music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists intermittently reflect on the danger and risk that ethnography can involve. Here, we advance this question in a contemporary research environment where the regulatory logics of occupational safety and health (OSH) encroach increasingly on anthropological practice through institutional research governance. We draw on our research into workplace OSH in the construction, health care, and logistics sectors—a research field dominated by behavioral theories that support the preventative logics of OSH regulation. Taking an autoethnographic approach, we explore how researching in potentially dangerous environments requires ethnographers to learn how to be safe through others’ situated safety logics and through those of researcher safety. It is, we argue, through these engagements with the improvisatory ways that workers generally, and researchers specifically, engage with safety, that another set of inconsistencies between OSH preventative logics and our anthropological understanding of how ethnographic knowing emerges become visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthcare integration projects typically involve significant organizational change, with the intention of providing improved patient services and outcomes through the integration of healthcare services. Some of the management needs of healthcare integration arguably go past the traditional domain of project management, leading practitioners in these projects to use change management in combination with project management. The focus of this article is on the ways that project managers, responsible for merging and integrating healthcare services, have used project management and change management approaches in combination when delivering these projects. The article involves an inductive analysis of data from the integration of 10 healthcare networks. The aim of this article is to contribute to the growing stream of project management literature that explores the blending of both project management and change management. Analysis of these healthcare integration projects led to five key themes, which can be summarized as: (1) traditional project management only partly aligns to the needs of healthcare integration projects; (2) benefits were found in combining project management with change management; (3) change management was particularly beneficial if used early in the project life cycle; (4) the life cycles of these two disciplines did not align, causing complications in practice, and (5) practitioners used an intuitive and improvisational approach to combining the disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scripted-IMPROV (SI) is a nonpharmacological (ecopsychosocial) intervention that consists of semi-improvised drama performances specifically designed for persons with dementia (PWD). In this 12-site study, 178 PWD took part in the SI intervention. Levels of engagement/affect were assessed at baseline and again during SI performances; quality of life (via the Dementia Quality of Life scale) and depression (via the Geriatric Depression Scale-Short Form [GDS-SF]) were assessed at baseline and posttreatment. Positive forms of engagement/affect increased, while negative forms of engagement decreased. Regarding depression, for a subsample of 29 participants who scored in the depressed range on the GDS-SF at baseline, depressive symptoms were reduced at post-treatment. Although overall quality of life did not change, the increase in positive affect during SI suggests that quality of life was higher during the intervention itself. In conclusion, SI possesses the characteristics of a high-quality intervention for PWD and seems worthy of further investigation in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a research project using arts workshops to explore pain communication, we develop a methodological reflection on the significance of the liveness of arts-based methods. We discuss how liveness informed the design of workshops to provoke novel forms of communication; how it produced uncontrollable and unpredictable workshops, whose unfolding we theorize as ‘imprography’. It also constituted affective and collective experiences of ‘being there’ as important but difficult-to-record parts of the data, which raises challenges to current understandings of what constitutes data, particularly in the context of team research and in light of directives for archiving and reuse. We explore the implications of liveness for methodological practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Actors in complex urban environments cope with uncertainties and interdependencies by using each other’s plans, subscribing to pre-existing decision-making frameworks, and building relationships with other actors over long periods of time. Improvisational comedians employ similar strategies to create coherent and meaningful multi-actor stories without a script or director; in short, they use “gifts,” “games,” and “group mind” to cope with uncertainty on stage. We use the metaphor of improvisational theater to illustrate how many plans over many years work to shape the urban built environment. This is accomplished by reformatting over 30 years of plans created by public and private organizations in Charlotte, North Carolina, into an improvised dialog of plans. This improvised “set” reveals how plans are used as signals among diverse actors over long periods of time, offering a counter-narrative to a dominant “plans-as-consensus, then implement” narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthcare practitioners are often presented with vulnerable encounters where their professional experience is insufficient when dealing with patients who suffer from illnesses such as chronic pain. How can one otherwise understand chronic pain and develop practices whereby medical healthcare practitioners can experience alternative ways of doing their practice? This essay describes how a group of researchers have, over a number of years, developed improvised participatory theatre as a means of engaging healthcare practitioners, patients and other lay people in situations where it is legitimate to reappraise their practice and reunderstand the nature of an illness such as chronic pain. One conclusion was to consider that it is a relational rather than an individual phenomenon that in turn demands alternative practice. Through iterative workshop processes of improvised theatre, participants are encouraged to experience the vulnerable, the unknown, and the need to be alternatively present when dealing with patients whose situation is imbued with suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way an improviser practices is a vital and significant aspect to a musician’s means and capacities of expression. Expert music performers utilize extensive self-regulatory processes involving planning, strategic development, and systemized approaches to learning and reflective practice. Scholars posit that these processes are constructivist and socioculturally explained and manifest in individual, jointly negotiated, and shared learning. This qualitative study explores the regulatory processes of four prominent Australian improvising musician-educators and four tertiary improvisation students. Expert and developing musicians’ processes in learning and teaching improvised music-making were investigated through observations of self-regulation, co-regulation, and shared regulation strategies. I identified and analyzed regulatory learning strategies located from practice, training, and experience using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Findings suggest insights of evolving self-regulative behavior that are dynamic, task-specific, personalised, and contextually contingent across individual and collaborative tasks and activity. An integrative regulatory model of learning offers guidance and reflection of metacognitive flow within a social constructed view of learning. Implications for researchers and educators are drawn for meaningful educational practice by knowing and understanding expert improvisers’ complex concepts of self-regulation, critical thinking, problem solving, and the evolution and evaluation of creative processes in improvisers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a sequential approach to improvisation teaching that can be used with students at various age and ability levels by any educator, regardless of improvisation experience. The 2014 National Core Music Standards include improvisation as a central component in musical learning and promote instructional approaches that are contextual, integrate musical concepts, and facilitate group interaction. The described approach focuses on the how and the why of improvisation instruction, offering a pedagogical guide through the teaching process using concepts of melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, and formal structure. Rather than a collection of isolated activities, the sequence builds on skills and concepts that are applied in authentic and meaningful group interactions. Examples are based on the blues and teaching techniques commonly used by jazz educators that can be adapted to any musical genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on assets-oriented, sociocultural theories of imagination and learning, the authors argue that the improvisational qualities and expanded resources of dramatic approaches to teaching make a positive difference in the quality of and persistence in students’ story writing. The authors describe findings from a controlled quasi-experimental study examining the outcomes of an 8-week story-writing and drama-based program, Literacy to Life, implemented in 29 third-grade classrooms in elementary schools with and without Title I funding located within the same urban school district in Texas. Pre- and post-measures of writing self-efficacy, story building, and generating and revising ideas showed significant positive results, especially for students in schools that receive Title I funding. Research findings and the sociocultural theoretical framework argue for increased resources in support of opportunities for students to practice combinatorial imagination and use cultural knowledge for creative writing, as was made possible through the Literacy to Life program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research in the neuroscience of musical creativity reveals promising implications for the value of learning to improvise. This article outlines the neuroscientific literature on musical improvisation and relates these findings to the benefits of musical creativity. We begin by describing the neural substrates of flow with respect to the mechanisms of improvisation. We then discuss how neuroscientific literature supports the argument that musical improvisation is a powerful means to express oneself and communicate with others, facilitating self-actualization and deeper connections with peers. Music educators can use these discoveries to bolster their advocacy for the use of creativity in music education and support their use of improvisation in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improvisation is an ideal way to develop musical creativity in ensemble settings. This article describes two prominent theoretical frameworks related to improvisation. Next, based on research with developing and expert improvisers, it discusses how to sequence improvisatory activities so that students feel accomplished at every step. Finally, the author recommends specific performance repertoire in various styles that allows for improvised solos during performance and outline various recordings and technologies for creating accompaniments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]