Some thoughts on research…is it just me?

 Firstly, thank you so much to everyone on Skype yesterday. It is always great to experience a sense of community through our meetings and I always leave feeling more positive and less lost in my own world. We talked a bit about blogging and it made me really think, I wish I had done it more to date as I completely see the relevance and usefulness of us sharing our thoughts through this medium. After talking about it yesterday and after reading Helen’s post last week I realised that on my part it definitely has to do with fear and a lack of confidence in my thoughts. I have a tendancy to get so caught up with regards to what to write and whether it will be suitable that the actual result is my producing precisely nothing.

I did find though that the act of writing and then more recently re-reading my last blog on AoLs really helped cement newly acquired knowledge in my mind, so if for no other reason I thought I’d give it another shot in reference to my latest pitfall! Today I am having a bit of an internal battle with some thoughts regarding research so I thought why not just go for it and let them out, apologies in advance if this turns into a rant, I can feel it building up.

It is of course essential to back up practice with theory and researching in and around a subject aids this excavation of existing knowledge. I love this process; I enjoy drawing parallels between disciplines and finding them in unlikely places, noticing how other practitioners share my methods or agree/disagree with my principles. What I have always struggled with is extracting and selecting what is most relevant, what best backs up what I want to say and what is worthy of use in my writing. I start to see relevance everywhere in the most obscure topics and want to use everything in my work. Whilst I know there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in the formulating of opinions there is a question of validity in the referencing of theory and the ‘good student’ part of my brain kicks in and I suddenly become worried about what is acceptable, whether my point is valid or if I have flown off in an unrelated direction.  I then find it almost impossible to stand back and organise my thoughts and findings into some kind of useable format.

This then leads directly into the next issue of when do you call enough, enough when it comes to researching around a particular topic? I am currently looking for theory to back up my AoL titles and I often find that the reading of one article will lead into a related and equally relevant piece of literature, this pattern then repeats exponentially and I honestly believe I could go on forever if I don’t eventually reign it in, but how do you know when?  What if I miss out on the most relevant and informative reading material ever because I stopped too soon. J Is it just me or does this process then turn into a form of academic procrastination? I don’t like to formalise my thoughts by actually beginning to write because I know my opinions might change, or I am concerned about the quality or relevance of my reading material or in all honesty I feel as if I am no clearer about what I want to say than when I started.

So…here I find myself, I’ve read about everything from educational reform in the Punjab to the postmetaphysical thinking of Habermas and Gadamer, from the methods of Laban and Barteneiff to a software developers take on best practices for teaching Python as a programming language. Am I ready yet? Maybe I’ll just read one more book and then I will begin…

In search of AoLs

It can often be frustrating when you are looking for something and you just can’t seem to find it.  It makes the situation much more challenging though if you don’t actually know you are looking for, or perhaps you misheard and are in fact looking for something completely different. This is a little how I feel about my AoLs right now.

I realised around a week ago that I had started to loose focus and direction with my learning. I just didn’t know what I needed to do or where I was heading. I have quite a long commute to work and I enjoy using this time to think, let things mull and try to make sense of my ideas, yet this can sometimes also lead to my thoughts getting carried away with themselves and I had begun to get side tracked and panicked again by the bigger picture. Thankfully I booked a Skype tutorial in for yesterday with Adesola and today I feel like hopefully I am a little more on track.

Over the past few weeks I have been looking in greater depth at my CV and job description, highlighting key themes and exploring further the skills I have learnt from each different area of my practice. I have found the process of doing this very beneficial as the act of putting everything down on paper helps me remember, revisit and reorganise my thoughts so they don’t get so confused just rattling around in my head. I felt like I was making progress and divided the areas out in to the following topics, which I initially considered to be my areas of Learning:

• ·      Teaching Martha Graham technique class.
• ·      Taking technique class and observing the teaching of other practitioners
• ·      Performing/Rehearsing as part of a company
• ·      Teaching audition classes
• ·      Teaching workshop classes
• ·      Attending performances and Networking
• ·      Relevant skills acquired from my second job

I then set about organising my skills under the relevant headings and outlining how I go about implementing them.  I found writing my reflective journal really helped with this as certain incidents informed me of other skills I utilise and I was able to continue adding to my on-going annotation.

Yesterday we looked at my existing categories and Adesola pointed out to me that whilst I was coming in with a good amount of experience, the headings I had elaborated on were purely activities carried out through me doing my job and not in fact Areas of Learning. She described this in a way that really helped me, explaining that ‘learning has to be something that started without a given template’ I understand this in the following terms; that to ascertain what your LEARNING is you have to look at the skills you have, the point at which you did not possess those skills and the learning is what happened in the space between.  

Adesola gave me a useful example of a possible area of learning as  ‘Bridging between two ports’. In terms of my practice I am bridging a gap with my teaching connecting the prior learning of students to the future demands of their study, this is something I have learnt to do myself through experience and is therefore an area of my learning. Hoorah! I first thought! I understand! But… do I really? I think I am starting to grasp the idea and have identified another area of my practice where I can demonstrate an example of this. Through teaching technique class I have learnt to bridge a gap between the live musician and the students through learning ways to work with the musician and draw the attention of the students to the music itself.  Hmmm… maybe? Thinking this way is hard, I am pretty sure that I had a pretty sleepless night while my brain tried to make sense of this. Trying to really concentrate on the how and why as opposed to just the what I have done I find difficult as I need to think in a much deeper way than I have previously. I’ve had ups and downs but I still feel as if I struggle to come in from the right angle. In areas of my reflective journal when I am talking about the present or recent past I am getting better at digging and pulling things apart but it doesn’t come easily particularly when trying to search for prior learning in the more distant past.

Moving forward, my next task is to look for other areas of learning that have developed through in my practice, I have some ideas which aren’t properly formulated yet including ‘translating between languages’ i.e. have developed ways to connect my verbal dialogue in class with the movement of the graham work and also other dance vocabularies. Another is developing and codifying my existing knowledge of the Graham technique class in a format that facilitates learning almost as a structured syllabus. To add depth and put the areas of learning in context I now have to draw parallels between the theory of this learning and how it manifests itself in other disciplines as well as my own i.e. What instances are there in other professions where people are bridging, translating or codifying?

So to summarise (if anyone has actually read this far,) I understand the process of compiling an area of learning to be:

• ·      Find a concept that defines the new learning experienced
• ·      Show how this links to an area of practice
• ·      Find theory to back up and demonstrate understanding of the learning
• ·      Further describe in greater depth the process of how the learning has developed and how it has informed and developed my practice.

So this week for me means digging deeper to find titles for more of my AoLs and lots of research to find some theories to back them up. Thank you for taking time to read and please feel free to comment, I would love to hear your thoughts!

Books!

Hello to all and thank you to everyone on Skype yesterday, especially all the Module Three students who were so encouraging and took time to answer our questions! It was so interesting to hear all your perspectives on the course and and also to really feel a sense of community even though we are all so spread out across our many locations.

Over the past week since our Module One Skype I have really enjoyed looking through the course material and getting my mindset prepared to begin study again. It does all seem more than a little overwhelming, however, I am trying my best to take the advise of Helen, Adesola and all the experienced MAPPers and NOT PANIC! I always find that for me the best way to engage with a subject is to read around it, as this not only gives me focus but also gets my brain to work and constantly think about relevant topics and ideas. I therefore asked the module three students what they began reading when they started out and which books they found to be the most helpful and informative. There were two clear winners (each on the Core Texts reading list in the student handbook,) I ordered both of these from Amazon last week and they arrived in just a couple of days:

Alan Durrant, Garth Rhodes, David Young (2009) Getting started with University-Level Work Bsed Learning. Middlesex University Press

Ruth Helyer (2010) The Work-Based Learning Student Handbook. Palgrave Macmillan

Everyone agreed that these were both great introductions to work based learning. The opinion was shared by all that they were informative and helpful as first texts before getting stuck into heavier reading, particularly if you did not come from a higher education background or had been away from education for some time. It was also mentioned that the Durrant, Rhodes, Young is a really short book (less than 100 pages) that is by far the least daunting and a great place to begin.

I'm off to start reading, I'll let you all know how it goes!

Putting myself on the MAPP

Hello everyone! Firstly I feel I should begin by saying I do realise I may come across rather keen getting this post up so early, I assure you it’s mostly fear that got it here so soon and not the eagerness and confidence I wish it was. With my almost non existent blogging, link-ing and twitting abilities, I figured I might as well bite the techno bullet and get on with it, just incase it took me a month to work out how! 

I haven’t yet had the chance to get stuck into the reading material, so instead of pondering I thought why not introduce myself by simply sharing a recent experience. 

At the end of last week I returned from participating in a four day workshop in Normandie, France. This was instructed by Amélie Bénard, a current member of the Martha Graham School Faculty and one of my lovely and hugely talented friends from my time studying in NYC. ‘Stage de Danse’ is an annual workshop for dancers and teachers of all ages and abilities to get a taste of the Martha Graham technique and to learn and explore some of the key principals of the movement vocabulary. I was instantly struck not just by the enjoyment and enthusiasm shared by all those attending but also by the amount that Amélie achieved throughout the course of the week. Considering that for the large majority of the students this is the only Graham technique they do each year I was amazed. The 8-10 year olds for whom some of it was their first time came in every day already rehearsing what they had learnt the day before culminating in them performing a 3 minute fully staged combination at the end of the week and the older teenagers and adults who had been coming for several years began to show a much deeper understanding of the movement and exude a real sense of eloquence and drama in their execution of some of the material. Most prominent of all was the drive and determination shared by all those taking part.

So, where am I going with this…Well the whole experience really supported my belief in the validity of teaching pioneering contemporary techniques and surmounted everything I know to be true about teaching Graham to the next generation when done the correct way. It also demonstrated how the technique could be kept true to form yet also cultivate excitement and creativity in a wide range of dance practitioners. So much of this positive experience is undisputedly down to Amelie and her natural ability to engage with the students across all age ranges and also the safe and positive environment she creates, not always synonymous with what is perceived to be a  ‘typical’ Graham class. I left on such a high and the experience instilled in me a new confidence with regards to many areas of my teaching practice whilst also giving me so much food for thought.

Thank you so much for reading my first blog post ever! Just in case you’re in the same position as I was and are a little terrified by the whole prospect of this I say Just go for it, You’ll find something to say :) Over and out, speak soon!