What do theatre students and engineers have in common? More than you might think, if a professor from Northwestern University, Illinois has anything to say about it.
Joseph Holtgreive is Assistant Dean and Director of the Office of Personal Development at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, and the driving force behind a popular class that teaches improvisation, or improv, skills to engineering students.
He says the unstructured, fast-paced nature of improv helps budding engineers extricate themselves from rigid thought patterns, and teaches them to be decisive even when outside their comfort zone.
Emily Koller passes a 'metaphor ball' to another student. Image courtesy of Northwestern University.
“Improv helps students learn how to trust their instincts when they need to make quick decisions,” Holtgreive says.
Improv also helps students access and exercise their right brains by embracing creativity, intuition, and metaphorical thought.
Holtgreive says that by using the right brain, engineers can look at problems through a new lens, crucial for brainstorming creative solutions to problems and implementing the design process.
“Combining the technical left brain with the creative right brain allows engineering students to innovate, lead, and bring new ideas to life,” he says.
The course also teaches students to be intentional about where they direct their focus.
“If your attention is focused on yourself, your ability to improv is blocked,” Holtgreive says. “Learning to improv requires engineering students to direct their attention outward toward their partners in a scene as they work to make everyone else successful. They receive and achieve success by giving to others and making everyone else successful.”
Chemical engineering student Caroline Kaden says she fell in love with the idea of “whole-of-brain engineering”.
“To truly engineer is to create, to problem solve, and to analyse from different directions. None of these are possible without both sides of your brain, and improv is one of many ways for engineers to open up the right side of the brain,” she says.
The university also offers Whole Body Engineering, which challenges engineers to collaborate through partner dancing, and Emotional Intelligence 101.
What do you think? Should “whole-of-brain” engineering be the standard for engineering courses? IPWEA members can comment below.