Many job advertisements highlight good communication as an essential skill. And the interview is a key opportunity to showcase this. To perform well in interviews, however, students must understand what good professional practice looks like in these settings. So, how can we exemplify this? We used role plays to dramatically demonstrate the opposite to encourage students to analyse and propose improvements, and the results were promising.
Inspiration for this activity came from the 2019 Advance HE Employability Symposium, in which two University of West London careers consultants, Jacqueline McManus and Catherine Taylor, described acting out interviews that do not go well as part of their career workshop provision. During these interviews, a third staff member would facilitate students’ comments on what the candidate could improve at any point during the scene. In their report The Cop in the Head: A Forum Theatre Approach to Interview Performance, McManus and Taylor give an in-depth exploration of their technique and its benefits. This idea was based on Augusto Boal’s forum theatre, in which audiences enact potential solutions to conflicts presented on stage.
We initially modified the concept for a professional French language seminar, during which a lecturer acted out the role of interviewee in a “bad” interview. The primary modification was that the role of the interviewer was played by a student rather than a staff member. The student received a list of questions in advance and the lecturer improvised her poor responses. As well as an introduction to interview technique, the exercise, undertaken in French, acted as a listening comprehension task.
At the end of the interview, the lecturer asked students to identify the failings of the interviewee and make suggestions for improvement. The interview was then rerun with these suggestions incorporated.
What next?
Seeing the value of this approach in a language class setting, we embarked on a further iteration that used ideas developed by McManus and Taylor, applying them to a module in the Faculty of Sciences. Biosciences students watched two versions of a live job interview. In this case, the role of interviewee was acted out by a trained drama student, following a brief agreed with the biosciences lecturer in advance. Teaching staff then took on the role of interviewer. The remainder of the exercise followed the pattern described above.
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Principles and preparation for improvised performances
A principle of forum theatre is that learning occurs through enactment as much as through observation. This can be challenging for students who prefer more passive engagement with learning and who might have an inherent resistance to this type of activity. For the exercise to work well:
- ensure all audience members contribute to the discussion to identify “bad” practice and how it can be improved
- establish rules of engagement to ensure balanced contributions from all students
- create and communicate clear learning outcomes in advance of the session to focus students on the employability and curricular benefits of the exercise
- develop a detailed script in advance (that also incorporates non-verbal behaviour) for the “bad” version of the interview
- provide general guidance for the second, improved interview, with flexibility to allow for responsive improvisation based on student feedback.
Pedagogically, it’s important that the audience sees their proposed improvements played out, which lends itself better to synchronous delivery. This is a key element that distinguishes this approach from a training video, for example.
Importantly, students’ inputs are based on common sense rather than previous knowledge or expertise in interview techniques, so the work should be valid for different levels of learning.
In our examples, the interviewee’s behaviour tended towards caricature in the bad interviews, making key principles more obvious, and allowing humour to make pitfalls more memorable. At a higher level, the acting of both bad and improved practice could be more nuanced, as appropriate to the context.
Ideas for the future
Next steps with this approach can build in ideas that have already been shown to be valuable. For example, as beneficial as it has been for students to observe and contribute to the improvement of a “bad” interview, a deeper value occurs when students enact their own suggestions. Our next iteration will offer this opportunity for students to test their own ideas, rather than have an actor do it for them, as per McManus and Taylor's practice of the technique.
This is a familiar concept to colleagues in health training, for example, where, in our institution, the drama department delivers a professionalised service for medicine and psychology students for both formative and summative assessments, through an in-house role-play service called CAST. This places trained actors in the role of a patient (in other faculties they might be rehearsing roles as a client or a CEO), and offers students the opportunity to practise real-life skills in simulated environments.
Our activities have so far centred on small group activities with fewer than 15 students, but the principles outlined could be used with larger, in-person groups or through synchronous online delivery.
There are wider applications, too, across all faculties. The approach, with only minor modifications, could also be adapted to other oral teaching scenarios, such as presentations or vivas. The method could also demonstrate to science students “how not to do an experiment”, as long as any scenarios demonstrating bad practice were undertaken safely by trained personnel.
The overarching value of this participatory method is that it can be adapted to incorporate both subject-specific skills as well as the wider, transferable employability values that cut across discipline boundaries.
Mike Bernardin is associate professor in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing; Richard Bowater is professor in the School of Biological Sciences; Claire Cuminatto is associate professor in the School of Media, Language and Communication Studies; and Gary Rowley is associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences. All work at the University of East Anglia.
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