ABSTRACT
There is a substantial literature on improvisation in education, but in most cases it concerns using improvisation to develop a particular limited skill. For example, it encourages children to play percussion instruments in an improvisatory manner in order to teach them essentials of rhythmic structure, or group texture. Or again, using improvised stories and group interactions to show the essentials of the dramatic process. These are very valuable approaches, which need to be encouraged. But the lack of emphasis in the education of musicians on even these limited skills, particularly at tertiary level, has serious negative consequences for both the psychological adaptation and the creativity of performing musicians (Jenkin, 1991). And as mentioned in Chapter 8, Mike Leigh has similarly negative experiences of the lack of improvisation study in tertiary drama college in the past, though the situation seems to have improved much more than it has in music. Improvisation is sometimes introduced in creative writing courses at tertiary level, in, for example, the guise of "freewriting". But this is not usually accompanied by training in the kind of linguistic techniques which might assist the generation
of an improvisation, and students are usually encouraged to see such work as only preliminary. The development of oral improvising techniques on such courses is rare.
