Free-Range Drama Farm

Leaving early tomorrow morning for a week of blissfully computer-less vacation in Florida. I am bringing my brain and my notebook, though, so I’m sure I’ll have lots to post about upon my return.

See ya real soon!

One of the things I keep coming back to after reading Informal Learning is the idea of a “learnscape”. Here’s an excerpt from an article Jay Cross wrote, explaining the concept:

Informal learning is about situated action, collaboration, coaching, and reflection, not study and reading. Developing a platform to support informal learning is analogous to landscaping a garden. A major component of informal learning is natural learning, the notion of treating people as organisms in nature. Our role as learning professionals is to protect their environment, provide nutrients for growth, and let nature take its course. Self-service learners connect to one another, to ongoing flows of information and work, to their teams and organizations, to their customers and markets, not to mention their families and friends.

Because the design of informal learning ecosystems is analogous to landscape design, I will call the environment of informal learning a learnscape. A landscape designer’s goal is to conceptualize a harmonious, unified, pleasing garden that makes the most of the site at hand. A learnscaper strives to create a learning environment that increases the organization’s longevity and health, and the individual learner’s happiness and well-being. Gardeners don’t control plants; managers don’t control people. Gardeners and managers have influence but not absolute authority. They can’t make a plant fit into the landscape or a person fit into a team.

A learnscape is a learning ecology. It’s learning without borders.

The idea of creating a nurturing environment for our students to thrive in, while they find their own way to the knowledge they need, is what got me started on this project in the first place. How do we create a learnscape that will allow them to do the best they can, giving them all the resources they need to find the answers, and making sure they know where to find them?

Two major things struck me as vital as I read through the book:

1. The working space has a huge impact on people’s ability to interact and learn from each other. You can’t cut them off - or allow them to cut themselves off - from each other; you have to encourage the conversation, because conversation is a huge part of informal learning. These are just random thoughts off the top of my head, but here’s a few ways we could do this with the Farm:
   • The physical environment - make sure there are lots of spaces that promote collaboration and conversation. Lounge areas to sit and chat, whiteboards and scratch paper to draw on and share ideas. Jay calls these shared spaces - media through which people collaborate, so that they’re seeing the same thing as they talk, and working in the same space.
   • The relationship between advisors and students - making sure the advisors are a presence, so the students are comfortable going to them with questions, without making the students feel as though their advisors are hovering or checking up on them. Keeping the advisors physically close to their area of expertise would help with this. No cluster of closed-off offices: the Acting advisor’s office should have a window that opens onto the rehearsal space; the Technical advisor’s office should look out into the scene shop; all of the offices should be conducive to sitting around and chatting.
2. Easy access to resources is another important part of the learnscape. You have to make it easy for people to find the right source to answer their questions, so that the learning doesn’t impede the work. A few possible ways to do this:
   • Keep a well-stocked library that’s open to students whenever they need it. Keep it up-to-date, and let the students make their own additions to the library - the best place to learn is from our peers.
   • Have computers available for students to do internet research as needed. Set up an online database of information for students to add to as well - possibly a wiki?
   • Keep everyone informed of what everyone else is doing. Instead of - or in addition to - a typical production meeting once a week, maybe we have a more informal chat about what we’ve been working on and the problems we’ve encountered. Sometimes someone has already found the answer to your problem, and you don’t know it until you talk to them.
   • Build relationships between everyone involved - staff and students alike. Talk about where we’ve been and what we’ve done - otherwise, how would you know that your Lighting advisor was once the rigger for a travelling circus show, and can help you work out how to hang that trapeze? Maybe we could have a weekly round-table discussion - topic of the students’ choosing - just to get the conversation going and build stronger relationships.

When it really comes down to it, creating a learnscape is best summed up by another quote from Jay:

“The best you can do is to establish the context, provide a purpose, and nurture the group.”

These are just my first thoughts on the matter, but I’ll continue to post things as they come to me. Until then, leave a comment and let me know if you’ve got other ideas on this - and if you’re interested in finding out more about learnscapes, you’ll find everything you need on the Internet Time Wiki learnscapes page. Have fun!

So, I just finished reading Informal Learning, by Jay Cross, and my brain is just spinning with all the possibilities. I’ve talked a little bit about the book here, but that was before I really got into the good stuff. Now, I think Jay Cross is my new hero.

The book is really geared towards using informal learning in employee training - that is, letting the employees be free-range learners, gathering information as they need it, rather than being sent to a week of training courses and having the knowledge force-fed to them, just so they can forget 80% of it when they leave the classroom. I think, though, that there are a lot of ways that informal learning can be applied to theatre education, even before theatre workers are done with their training and join the workforce.

Anyone who’s been through a college theatre program knows that there’s already a lot of informal learning involved - every time a student works on a production, they’re learning on-the-spot, solving problems as they go. But college-level production work frequently takes place in something of a bubble - the student goes to class all day, then spends four hours focusing on the production, before returning to the world of school and homework. In the best of circumstances, that schoolwork ties in with the production work, and the student makes connections and applies what they learn in class to what they’re doing in production - but the nature of the college situation is that learning through actual experience is limited to a small portion of the day.

So what happens when we shake that up? What if students spend 80% of their time learning through experience and 20% attending workshops and seminars, instead of the other way around? That’s what I want to find out with the Drama Farm. I think as long as the students have a solid base of knowledge to work from - which their more conventional theatre programs will have given them - the opportunities to learn from experience are endless. Especially if we shape their experience to guide them towards the things that they’ll learn the most from. Jay calls this “learnscaping” - I’ll be writing more about that shortly.

Until then, if you’re interested, check out the book - it’s definitely worth a look!

Becoming a not-for-profit organization appears to be pretty simple. Getting 501(c)(3) (tax-exempt) status, not quite so easy.

For the poor souls out there who haven’t had a course in Everything You Ever Needed to Know about Theatre Management from the fabulous Don Marinelli (founder and head of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center), a 501(c)(3) is an organization that the IRS has exempted from paying taxes, because of their charitable work in education, scientific research, religion, or a whole slew of other altruistic things. Even better, though, is the fact that any charitable donations made to a 501(c)(3) are tax-deductible - is that a great way to get people to give you money, or what?

So, I’m looking into what it takes to achieve tax-exempt status, since we’ll definitely want to do that before we start asking people to give us money. Nolo has a great little online guide to get you started, but it seems that - like everything else - the rules for incorportating and applying for tax-exempt status are a little bit different in California than they are in the rest of the country.

Of course, there’s a book for just that problem, so I stopped by Nolo’s outlet in Berkeley the other day and picked it up. I’d never used one of Nolo’s books before, but I’m incredibly impressed, just from the small amount I’ve read so far - if you’re in the market for a layman’s guide to anything law-related, they’re definitely the place to go.

I’ll post updates here as I glean key pieces of information on starting a non-profit, but for now I leave you with this tidbit: If you’re doing anything that involves legal stuff, and you’re in California, research it very carefully, because everything works differently here. Everything.