An adept improviser can find ways forward amid impasse, agency amid oppression, and community amid division. The editors and contributors to The Improviser’s Classroom present an array of critical approaches intended to reimagine pedagogy through the prisms of activism, reciprocity, and communal care.

Demonstrating how improvisation can inform scenes of teaching and learning, this volume also outlines how improvisatory techniques offer powerful, if not vital, tools for producing connection, creativity, accompaniment, reciprocity, meaningful revelation, and lifelong curiosity.

The Improviser's Classroom champions activist pedagogies and the public work essential for creating communities bound together by reciprocal care and equity.

Contributors: Sibongile Bhebhe, Judit Csobod, Michael Dessen, jashen edwards, Kate Galloway, Tomie Hahn, Petro Janse van Vuuren, Lauren Michelle Levesque, George Lipsitz, Rich Marsella, Tracy McMullen, Hafez Modirzadeh, Ed Sarath, Joe Sorbara, Jesse Stewart, Ellen Waterman, Carey West, and the editors

Daniel Fischlin is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He is the founding Director of the Critical Studies in Improvisation Graduate program (MA/PhD) at the University of Guelph, as well as the co-founder and Artistic Director of the community artspace Silence. The author or editor of over thirty books, he is the coeditor of the recent publications, Sound Changes: Improvisation and Transcultural Difference and Playing For Keeps: Improvisation in the Aftermath.

Mark Lomanno is a jazz pianist, ethnomusicologist, and faculty member in the Musicology Program at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. They are former Chair of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Improvisation Section and founder of “The Rhythm of Study,” a public forum that celebrates jazz musicians’ work in the arts, academia, and community activism. A former Mellon Foundation and Consortium for Faculty Diversity fellow, Lomanno has also been awarded several fellowships for his ethnographic and performance work in the Canary Islands.