Free-Range Drama Farm

I just spent a great weekend in Mendocino with a bunch of friends, some of whom I haven’t seen in almost a year. As we chatted and caught up on each other’s lives, I got a lot of questions about what I’ve been working on lately - and I found I didn’t really know how to tell them. The Drama Farm is such a unique, out-there idea - how do you explain it in terms better than “this crazy theatre internship idea I have”, without taking over the conversation for 10 minutes?

There are a lot of great resources out there to help you write an elevator pitch (also known as a 15-second pitch) - basically, the idea is to have a brief overview of your venture that hits all the key points, but is short enough to tell someone about in the space of an elevator ride - ideally, 15-30 seconds. I’ve read through a lot of them, and I’ve been tossing ideas around in my head for a while, but I hadn’t really come up with the right words yet - which left me sort of sputtering and sounding clueless anytime anyone asked about what I was doing.

So, I spent some time this weekend trying to figure out how to explain the basic idea of this project to someone who knows nothing about it, without telling them everything about it. My problem is that all the concepts I want to use to explain the Drama Farm end up needing explanations of their own: it’s a theatre internship based on informal learning, but no one knows what informal learning is; it’s a professional-level theatre production with the safety net of an educational environment, but how is that different from a college theatre production?

After giving it some serious thought, here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

“It’s a semester-long theatre internship program. We’d take two dozen students, give them a professional director, a script, a budget, and all the resources they need, and let them at it. They’d make all the decisions and do all the planning, but with a staff of advisors there to guide them when they needed it.”

It’s definitely a work in progress, but what do you think so far? Does it make sense? If you knew nothing about the project - or even really about theatre education - would you get the idea? Better yet, would you be excited by it? Tell me what you think!

As I work on this project more and more, it’s really starting to hit me how many different skills it takes to start something like this. I know a lot about the theatre production end of things, and a good bit about teaching and mentoring, but I could really use someone to talk to who knows about promotion. And fundraising. And nonprofit law. I’m not ready to actually move forward on any of these things yet, but oh for someone to discuss them with…

That got me thinking about Chris Brogan, who I met last year when he wrote a post (which I can’t seem to find now) on his blog, putting out a call for superheroes to join his ever-expanding network of Go-To Guys. What stuck with me from Chris’ post was that everyone has a super power of some sort - something they’re really really good at, often without anyone even knowing it. You may not be the superhero who’s going to save the world, but even Jimmy Olsen had a few super powers of his own.

I know most of you out there reading are theatre folk, but I also know that you’ve all got other super powers too - some that you use in your theatre work, and some that no one would ever know about unless they asked. So, I’m asking - what’s your super power? Mine’s organizing stuff. Lots of stuff. With spreadsheets and timetables and 47 people who need to be doing 93 different things in the next 24 minutes. Might you have need of my powers someday? Maybe we can trade!

Even if you don’t think your powers would be useful here, leave a comment and tell me what they are, or email me if you’d rather - I want to hear from you! I’m thinking of starting a Little Black Book of Superheroes for myself - first five people in it get a cookie!

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!

David Seah, who writes a great blog about productivity and motivation in the world of freelancing, just wrote a really interesting post about the value of having a co-schemer - someone who shares your passion and excitement, and makes your cause their own - as opposed to a collaborator, who contributes ideas and works with you on pieces of your project, but takes on a more rational, product-focused role. Don’t get me wrong - collaborators are a great thing to have - but nothing is quite the same as someone who jumps on board completely and becomes a true partner in crime, taking your idea and running with it, and fueling your fire with their own passion.

I was just talking to Ben, who has a Crazy Scheme of his own, about how perfect the term “Crazy Scheme” is - there’s really no other phrase that evokes quite the same emotional reaction, or has the same connotation as that one. It was coined by a professor of ours from college, and we’ve all started using it ourselves - it’s great for those projects that you know are totally out in left field, and you’re probably crazy for trying, but you still believe you can make them work - and when you do, the results are pretty darn amazing.

What does all this have to do with the Drama Farm, you ask? Well, even with all this talk of Crazy Schemes, until I read David’s post I hadn’t realized how important it is to have a co-schemer to keep you motivated, to bounce your ideas off of and keep things exciting. Without someone to scheme with, things can get pretty lonely - even when you’re working on the thing you’ve been dreaming about for years…

All this time I’ve been looking for collaborators - that was largely what instigated putting this website together - but what I really need is a co-schemer. I need a partner who wants to make this project their own, who’s as excited about it as I am, and will do whatever it takes to make it happen - just like me. Are you crazy enough to be that schemer? If you are, I want you!