MA Dance Pedagogy

Whilst analysing my data I found it very enlightening to look at the context of my professional samples' work and then look at their corresponding answers. There were key links I interpreted as to how someone answered a question and the relation of that answer to their work. Katie was also a really important part of the inquiry as she is currently building her confidence and developing her teaching skills and is attending lots of classes during the week before she takes on her own classes. I felt this gave her answers a lot of weight as she could look at the situation from an almost 'insider-researcher' position. For example she mentions that "being praised and hearing you have progressed is always a nice thing to hear" (Katie, 2017) and I believe this is such an important statement as she is looking at that from how she feels in class, so has noted the importance of her feeling good after being praised and being told she has progressed. Roger also made

If I am to reflect on who I am now in relevance to my professional practice and who I was when I started the course, I feel I have made massive leaps and bounds towards understanding more about my professional practice. When I first started the course and wrote my first blog, one student picked it apart so much I had to delete it. I felt vulnerable, on display and under qualified to be taking on this work. I was hesitant to write any blogs after this and kept my learning to myself. Even in my critical reflection in Module 1 I tried to point out all the advantages of learning alone to justify my actions. I then took a break from studying for personal reasons and I truly believed I didn't want to complete the degree anymore. I put off talking to my tutor and again tried to work everything out by myself. I eventually did talk to my tutor, and I explained I no longer wanted to study. She asked me if this was really the case and if perhaps I just needed a bit more time out before cont

Whilst waiting for my draft to be returned I decided I should make use of my rare free evening time and go back to one of my favourite Jazz classes at Pineapple Dance Studios. I chose to blog about this because I felt really aware during the class of the teacher and their gestures, body language and vocabulary use throughout the class. The teacher was extremely welcoming and seemed excited to start. There was no aux cable when the teacher started to plug in their music so the class started a few minutes late, but the teacher was very practical about getting the lead as quickly as possible and there was a sense of efficiency which meant I personally didn't mind the class starting a few minutes late. During the set warm up and technical exercises there appeared to be a real 'buzz' in the room. The teacher smiled a lot and seemed excited as the music came on and we were preparing for an exercise. This left me feeling energised and wanting to put my all into each exercise w

My first class teaching after doing the anaylsis for my inquiry was really interesting as I felt I held in my head a lot of new knowledge and power for teaching. Whilst a lot of the anaylsis interpretation showed me I understood the answers to the questions I asked and would have answered them similarly, I got a really good insight into other practitioner's thoughts on teaching and some insight into what they thought of dance and fitness as an industry. When I entered my class to teach today I felt like I was in my own little world for a short while - trying to process all the things I wanted to try and all the things I'd learnt. After processing this I decided to implement two important elements that teachers believed to be really important to successful classes in the way of enjoyment; create a welcoming atmosphere for my clients and to treat everyone as an individual (make each client feel important). As people started entering the room I said hello to them all indivi

I felt like I was a bit behind with where I wanted to be in the inquiry and felt a little lost. I had a good chat with Adesola about some difficulties I had been having. We discussed the idea that perhaps I was looking at doing too much data collection for the project. I had already done interviews from professional instructors and was preparing to do a couple of focus groups with my colleagues at  workplace and then several observations with different teachers. If there wasn't a time constraint on the inquiry then I would have still quite liked to do these observations and I think I will set these up after the inquiry is over because I know it will be good for my own professional practice - in the vast majority of the interviews, exercise and dance professionals stated that to improve professional practice shadowing and observing fellow professionals was key. Adesola reminded me that having too much data collected and then not much time to anaylse would make my inquiry quite sha