The theatrical and the accidental academic: An autoethnographic case study

Introduction

In recent years, autoethnography has gained both popularity and credibility in the social sciences as a method for investigating the self within a culture. Autoethnographers collect data drawn from their personal experience, analyse and reflect on this data, and then frame it within the context of culture, society and others. The aim of this, as defined by Chang (2008: 49) is to ‘gain a cultural understanding of self and others directly and indirectly connected to self’.

The potential of this type of writing has been widely recognised by researchers and practitioners within education, as their practice is inherently bound up with both other people and a prevailing culture. As such it has become a useful and appropriate framework for consideration of professional and academic development within this sector (e.g. Dyson, 2007; Hernández et al., 2010; Stefani, 1999; Trahar, 2013; Vasconcelos, 2011). As a professional technical theatre practitioner working within Higher Education in the UK, I decided that autoethnography would offer the opportunity to analyse my unique experience whilst setting it in a wider context. This could help both me and others navigate and make sense of a rapidly changing sector. I was inspired by the challenges of my own experience, and the realisation that what I have learnt on my journey from theatrical to academic could provide insight to others already working within the performing arts in Higher Education or considering this as a career path. I have also been inspired by the work of Wenger (1998) on communities of practice; it seemed to me that the theatrical and the academic world were two very distinct communities, and that I was working to move to a new ‘overlap’ community, that of theatre practitioners who have made their home in the academic world. I hoped that an autoethnographic study could help me consider how I have dealt with this change, how it has changed me and how I have become part of my new community.

The case study

In this autoethnographic case study, I consider how aspects of my life story intertwine on my journey into academia. Throughout, I have been part of many ‘communities of practice’ defined thus by Wenger (2011: 1): ‘Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly’. This theme recurs during the telling of my story. In particular, I am interested in the application of this theory to learning as social participation: how does my membership of and participation in these communities form and influence my career trajectory? In using the theory of communities of practice to frame the autoethnography I will consider the various academic identities I adopt, both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’; the nature of leadership and transferable skills from my professional practice; and the context of my discipline, the institution and the wider landscape of Higher Education.

A significant influence in this case study has been this quote from the playwright David Hare (Hare, 2009 in Eyre, 2009: 191)

In society today to one side lies academia … and to the other side what’s called the media … And down the middle of the road drives the British theatre, where people, … present something which is both sensible and idealistic.

The ‘theatrical’

All theatrical endeavour starts with an idea, which to be realised must be shared with a group, whether fellow collaborators or an audience (Cohen, 2011). My journey into academic leadership started with a visit to the theatre where I was entranced by the ‘magic’ and knew that I wanted to be an ‘insider’, eventually applying to study drama at university. Here, I felt most at home in the community of students who had selected modules in the backstage aspects of theatre. In the university’s studios and workshops we worked and socialised together, learning from academic tutors, theatre practitioners and each other. I first experienced being a leader in a theatrical context, as the stage manager of university productions, and began formulating my ‘philosophy’ of what constitutes effective leadership in theatre, on which I expand later in this article.

This was my first experience of both the theatre and Higher Education communities of practice; an ‘insider’ as both a student and member of the technical theatre ‘gang’. Following my degree, I gained further experience volunteering in youth and community theatre, experiencing the community of a producing theatre, in which people with very diverse job roles collaborate to create a piece of art (Cohen, 2011). I made a journey from ‘outsider’ to ‘insider’, particularly through participating as Assistant Stage Manager in a community play. I then undertook further post-graduate training at a traditional drama conservatoire, which opened the door to professional work and full membership of the theatrical community. Having experience of both an academic degree and drama school training would prove invaluable me to in my later career, offering insight and understanding of these contrasting ‘worlds’.

During the next 10 years I worked as a stage manager, a period of learning through professional practice. I worked throughout the UK on a wide variety of projects, and although there were many challenges, they were overcome – after all ‘the show must go on’. During this time, I continued to develop my thoughts about the nature of leadership, my stage management ‘proverbs’, from which I derived key beliefs about what effective leaders do in the theatre. These I articulated as follows:

Stage management always foresee problems and solve them before anyone else even realises there is a problem.

I realised that leadership in theatre must be merged with effective collaboration through communication to ‘produce performances that are seamlessly integrated and forcefully propelled’ (Cohen, 2011: 15) and that to facilitate this, functional organisational structures must be in place.

The accidental academic

After ten years as a freelance stage manager, I made the decision to begin working at a well-established independent UK drama school, initially remaining a stage manager as well as a novice teacher, whilst also becoming a parent. It was a time of intense hard work and finding strategies to retain a work life balance. This is commonly seen as a very challenging time for academics, in combining career progression with family responsibility. However, the necessary multi-tasking to manage both a job and a family simultaneously, actually improved and increased my skills.

I believed that my experience as a stage manager offered an excellent ‘toolkit’ of transferable skills, including communication, organisation, people and project management, which I could use in other contexts. This has long been a staple idea in education and was specifically promoted by Dearing (1997) in his report into Higher Education. However others have argued the notion of transferable or key skills is meaningless due to a lack of ‘evidence which supports the idea of context – independent or generally applicable core/key skills’ (Hyland and Johnson, 1998). The drama school where I worked was at that time a private institution, with a very strong sense of theatrical identity and community; because of this I continued to feel like an ‘insider’. It did not feel like academia, but like a ‘training theatre’ where students learnt from the more experienced, as apprentices would. Hence my skills felt ‘transferable’ because the context was so similar to the professional theatre.

It was here that I first experienced the concept of conservatoire learning being a ‘practicum’, where the setting is specifically designed in order to learn a practice through a process of reflection in action (Schon, 1987). I was also introduced to Kolb’s (1984) learning cycle, with its emphasis on reflection. However, as I worked through several years of relentless productions, the concept of having time for reflection seemed an unattainable luxury, leading me to question the efficacy of the conservatoire approach. I discovered that the notion of the practicum is so deep-rooted in the thinking of performing arts practitioners, that to question it and suggest new pedagogies led to ‘outsider’ status.

During these intense years, the decision was taken by leaders to integrate into the much larger, technology and business focused local university. The move was initially presented as ‘business as usual’ – everything would be exactly the same, but with better facilities. However, gradually the independent college became a department of the university, adopting the administrative systems and structure of the larger institution, often with significant effect on the operations of the drama school: for example a two semester year replaced the old three terms, leading to a shortening of the academic year by 6 weeks, a total rewrite of all programmes and assessed productions being bunched together. A decision to standardise all modules across the university meant another total rewrite of all programmes. Workloads increased and budgets decreased, along with more stringent financial scrutiny from university management. Functions such as programme administration, human resources and marketing were centralised, leading to a sense of confusion amongst staff and students about who to approach with questions and problems and decreasing the community feel of the institution. During this time, I heard staff refer to their workplace experiences as ‘an emotional rollercoaster’, ‘a ghost train – we set it up but we don’t know if it will work’, ‘the Wild West, because you don’t know what’s coming around the corner’ and ‘I feel like we’re crawling out of the ruins after the Blitz’. Throughout staff made every effort to shield students from any negative effects, although inevitably such a large amount of change precipitated a degree of unease and unrest amongst the student body.

As this challenging process continued I discovered that my key beliefs about effective leadership in theatre did not prove as easily transferable as I had first imagined. Strategies I had found expedient in theatre did not lead to results and I felt increasingly frustrated and powerless. A desire to make this situation work better for me encouraged me to consider how I could adapt my leadership beliefs to this new context. Unlike technical theatre, extensive literature exists on what constitutes effective leadership in Higher Education. A search of this lead me to Bryman’s summary (2007), who identifies 13 key aspects of effective leader behaviour at a departmental level.

Many of these are similar to my personal beliefs on effective leadership in stage management, and hence initially I found it straightforward to translate these from one context to the other. These included:

Being considerate/treating academic staff fairly and with integrity – essential in any context where people are the key resource.

However my experience as I gradually merged into the academic community encouraged me to identify which aspects highlighted significant differences between academic and theatrical leadership:

Clear sense of direction/strategic vision – long term planning in line with the institution’s overall strategic direction, influenced by current directions in both the theatre industry and national policy for Higher Education.

In summary, whilst my principles are sound for short term projects, the academic leader needs considerably more ability in strategic thinking and long-term vision. While the stage manager’s job is to prevent anything from adversely affecting the performance (Maccoy, 2004), the academic leader can take a longer view, with mistakes and inefficiencies a necessary part of organic growth (Knight and Trowler, 2001).

This has had a significant impact on my academic identity, being both an ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ depending on context. Figure 1 describes how I currently feel about my position within the institution. OPEN IN VIEWER

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Me, them and the university.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Professional community of practice.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Relationships within the institution, represented as communities of practice.

My feet are planted within the drama school, then within the department I have significant interaction with other academic colleagues within the department, who work across related programmes, and also have daily interaction with other colleagues, such as the administrative, operations and technical team. My head is in the university as a whole and I feel little identification with the faculty for both disciplinary and physical proximity reasons.

Simultaneously, my role has evolved to encompass wider responsibilities, encouragement towards research, focus on academic development, more external scrutiny and more administrative tasks. These changes have been precipitated by institutional policies and reviews, such as the university long-term strategy, the impact of the Research Excellence Framework on funding and various restructures and operational reviews, in the interests of management efficiency. These in turn have been influenced by central UK government policy. I now have multiple identities: pastoral tutor, lecturer, research academic and administrator. This was demonstrated by an exercise in which I considered myself in relation to colleagues and the wider institution (Figure 2).

I described myself primarily as a teacher, administrator and mentor, only after prompting taking on the label of an ‘accidental academic’ – not a ‘proper academic’. I believe this was rooted in both the many roles I play and the newly emerged status of stage management as an academic discipline, my feelings being similar to those expressed by nursing lecturers involved in the ‘academisation’ of a previously vocational subject (Findlow, 2011) and in art and design practitioners engaged as part-time tutors in Further and Higher Education (Shreeve, 2009). There is an element of the ‘doubleness’, as expressed by Learmonth and Humphreys (2011): I would like to believe that producing a piece of theatre is a noble collaborative artistic pursuit, whereas climbing the ladder to academic leadership is all about opportunistic self-promotion. The truth is not so black and white.

I have also engaged in self-development both inside and outside the institution. I took on the role of governor at a local comprehensive school, giving me insight into how a contrasting educational community functions and manages multiple demands. Within the university I participated in the graduate certificate in learning and teaching, joining a new disciplinary community of practice relating to the pedagogy of Higher Education. Having completed this process in 2014, my theatrical and educational passions, passions have now combined to come together in my career and a new belief that academic leadership is a feasible path.

Again I have found the theory of ‘communities of practice’ helpful in framing my understanding and analysis of my journey in academia as I consider the identity trajectories – inbound, insider, boundary or peripheral (Wenger, 1998) of my current communities and how they relate to one another.

This diagram (Figure 3) represents the professional community of practice: I am a full member and participant, engaging continually in discussion with others outside of my institution: those engaged solely in professional practice, those who mix professional practice and academic work, and those engaged solely in academic work.

In evaluating my academic identities, I have again been influenced by the work of Wenger (1998), as I analysed my membership of various interrelated communities: am I a full member of the community (insider), at some points in my practice a member of the community, though not fully (boundary), or only occasionally coming into contact with the community (peripheral)? This exercise revealed that my academic identities are nuanced and multi-faceted as Figure 4 suggests: I adopt the roles of project manager (ensuring students get productions open successfully), people manager (facilitating students to work effectively in a team) and crisis manager (mediating between creative teams and technicians to facilitate a positive learning experience for students engaged in production based modules). This leads to a complex identity, which can be challenging to define in terms of separate communities, but I believe is enriching to my practice as an academic. Self-identification in specific communities can also lead to a ‘ghetto’ mentality, whereby new learning and knowledge are rejected as ‘not how we do things here’. This is an attitude I have encountered in both theatre and academic worlds and one which I am careful not to espouse.

The emerging academic

Having completed the learning and teaching certificate, my theatrical and educational passions combined as I began to see that academic and leadership within that sphere was a feasible career path. It was clear from the journey so far that neither theatre nor academia stand still – an academic leader needs a willingness not only to embrace but to lead change (Knight and Trowler, 2001).

Continuing the journey into academic leadership, I have undertaken a range of activities relevant to the UK Professional Standards Framework for Higher Education (2011). These have included:

Management of teaching in my discipline

However, it is clear from the self-audit tool (Figure 5) that some areas need work, particularly in evidencing my achievements. OPEN IN VIEWER

The academic leader

I no longer consider myself an ‘accidental academic’; by working to overcome the challenges I have faced, I now feel established in my new community of practice (theatre practitioners working as academics). I have had opportunities to take up leadership and management roles within my institution and to begin working on pedagogical research. Despite still occasionally working as a stage manager I have fully committed to an academic career. This has led me to reflect on the challenges and opportunities facing me and how I will use my previous experience in academic leadership.

There are certainly many challenges facing those of us engaged in teaching the new generation of stage managers within the UK. The current government focus on the importance of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects in school is concerning in terms of recruitment to our courses. To quote the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan (2014):

Even a decade ago … the arts and humanities were what you chose. Because they were useful for all kinds of jobs. Of course now we know that couldn’t be further from the truth, that the subjects that keep young people’s options open and unlock doors to all sorts of careers are the STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and maths.

The Warwick Commission report (2015) noted that between 2003 and 2013 there was a 50% fall in GCSE entries for design technology, a 23% fall for drama and a 25% drop for other craft-related subjects. Less students coming through the doors of universities and conservatoires will mean less trained practitioners entering the UK creative industries.

Technical theatre training itself has changed radically, a process initially identified and described in the Farthing report (2012). As drama schools have moved into universities, and simultaneously universities have adopted vocational-style programmes, tensions have arisen between professional and academic identities, similar to those in a design discipline described by Jawitz (2009). The new (but as yet undefined) concept of the ‘university conservatoire’ has arisen, suggesting vocational conservatoire training blended with academic study.

Finally a specific challenge to the academic stage manager is the focus in the performing arts on the ‘practice-as-research’ model – a hard to define entity and even harder for stage management to engage in, as the facilitators rather than originators of performance work.

However, there are definite opportunities currently for the academic stage manager. As a relatively un-researched subject, the field is wide open for new thinking and knowledge, an exciting prospect for anyone within my community of practice. Equally the ‘university conservatoire’ model could offer new collaborative and inter-disciplinary opportunities to academics and students, and ‘practice-as-research’ easily lends itself to interdisciplinary and collaborative knowledge production (Barrett and Bolt, 2010). Collaboration and creating new knowledge through the art of the theatrical production has always been central to the stage manager’s skill set. Inspiration for the future of stage management in academia can be gained by looking to the US, where stage management has long been established as a discrete discipline in top-ranking research intensive universities, such as Yale and Columbia.

Conclusion

Both the theatre and the conservatoire offer models of communities of practice which can be applied to the academic sphere. However, it would be naïve to expect that the modes of operation and delivery common in the first two settings can be translated directly into academia. The main reasons are differences in focus and scale. In the theatre ‘everyone must pull their own weight and pull it all the time or disaster may follow’ (Cohen, 2011: 10) – and everyone is pulling that weight to a very clearly defined goal. Similarly in the conservatoire the goal is simple: by means of intensive training, ensure all students are employable in the entertainment industry. The academy, in contrast, has many goals: improving research quality and output, providing an excellent student experience, increasing international impact, fulfilling government policy and becoming financially profitable. These goals are long term; not the six weeks’ rehearsal, three months’ run of a typical West End play.

Nonetheless David Hare’s idea of producing something ‘sensible and idealistic’ is still my vision. As a stage manager I am experienced in managing the collaboration of distinct groups to produce a show; as an academic leader I must manage many demands to keep ‘driving down the middle of the road’ toward development and improvement in my discipline and the wider institution. This will, as in the theatre, require careful planning, compromise, decisiveness, empathy: the identities I already employ as project manager, crisis manager and people manager.

Evaluation

Reviewing my story in the context of the people, places and things that have shaped my academic development, has reinforced my view of autoethnography as an effective method of analysing how the personal fits into the wider context. I believe that my story is reflective of many who begin their working lives in performing arts roles and then move into related fields as their lives change and career develop. So the question that arises is, how can what I have discovered through this process be used to address key issues current in performing arts in Higher Education? The first of these is the difficulty of the recruitment and retention of appropriate teachers. Practitioners often struggle with the culture and ethos of working in Higher Education, feel ill-equipped for administrative tasks and out of place in the world of academia, which seems full of systems, rules and terminology which they do not understand. We need to ensure that staff are aware of the expectations of the system and are supported in learning and developing on the job; we also need to make explicit the huge differences between theatre and the academy.

The second is the place of performing arts training in the academy. How can we bridge the cultural gulf between vocational training and the academic world? Is it worth doing anyway? Perhaps the research-led university is not the best place for vocational training. It is certain that a lot of what is presented as research in the performing arts is entirely incomprehensible to practitioners, even those working in creative roles at the top of their profession. Or do we make more strenuous attempts to bridge the gaps, to show how, without researchers pushing the boundaries, huge commercial theatrical successes such as War Horse may never have happened?

I hope that this autoethnography had provided insight into the challenges and opportunities of moving from the theatre to the academy and that others in similar positions, whether in performing arts or in other vocational fields, may find aspects to relate to their own professional lives.