What Can the Dramatic Arts Teach an Engineer?
C. P. Snow spoke of the largely incompatible “two cultures” of the humanities and the sciences. Yet actors and engineers may not be as different as first perceived! “Culture” has diverse meanings, from the attitudes and customs that distinguish a group, to attending to a living thing to encourage its vitality and growth. An essential element in the arts is the ensemble: a shared process, built on teamwork, in which each member contributes his or her skills to an overall creative endeavor, a “production.” For me, this is what engineering and engineering education is also about: giving novice engineers — students — experiences in tackling problems with creative team-developed interdisciplinary approaches, implemented within a group project. While the culmination may be an artifact rather than a performance, teamwork, mutual support and acceptance, and the power of a group-driven creative process hold true in both disciplines.
I have always had an interest in theatre, and participated in some small roles in amateur productions. I never had any formal training in the dramatic arts, but I did have a sense that there could be techniques from that world that could usefully translate into the way I ran my research projects.
In 2016, while on sabbatical, I took a training program for teachers at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco called Back to the Source (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNYmkY_Q2RA). The curriculum consisted of learning the building blocks of dramatic arts techniques, such as voice, movement, and improvisation, leading to a jointly staged production. The process, founded on team building and a cooperative and integrative approach, culminated in a jointly developed “rap” on the theme of the course, namely coming back to the source of inspiration and creation. For me, this was a transformational and invigorating experience.
The National Academies recognized the value of the humanities and arts in Science and Engineering in their 2018 report “The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education”: https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/the-integration-of-the-humanities-and-arts-with-sciences-engineering-and-medicine-in-higher-education.
As Engineering faculty, we often struggle to introduce cooperative work and joint projects into our courses. Unfortunately, while teamwork is meant to be an outcome of such efforts, all too often students learn that if they want a good grade, they have to work by themselves. This is the exact opposite of what we wish to achieve.
Using the language of dramatic arts, and grading our students on how well they formed a mutually supportive ensemble, and just the quality of the production they created, could go a long way towards embedding the career skills of communications, responsibility, collaboration, and teamwork in their education.
