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!
