MA Dance Pedagogy

Slightly off track from AOL essays... I picked up a book yesterday called 'The Art of Thinking Clearly' in a little bookshop on the high road. I hoped it would help me with my terrible lack of decision making I usually have; 'which coat shall I wear?', 'do I need a coat?', 'should I accept this invitation to meet a friend or stay in and work?', 'is my work going to suffer or be better if I have a social life?'...... my poor little mind gets very confused with decision making. I read the first few chapters and felt like Dobelli was being clear cut and blunt with the readers, he took control of the situations and told the reader everything was nonsense. All the links we create with our brains about events, reasons why we meet people or have experiences, its all unlinked, its just our brains trying to create patterns and it makes us feel more comfortable. I started to feel a little uneasy reading, but I carried on because its good for my beliefs

Hey everyone - hope you all had good weeks. I started my new teaching role this week so I am pretty tired now and haven't managed to do as much work as I had hoped to this week. I wondered if anyone would be willing to talk about the Areas of Learning essays? I have a few brief ideas so I'm just looking at how to develop my ideas a bit more in a sense of getting my original subject titles off the ground and to start writing! I have two ideas for subjects of the essays, the first being Nurturing students as a teacher - I feel the broad range of people I have taught have allowed me to develop a strong sense of nurturing students during class and trying to help them become the best they can be. I think this could be partly down to my own training where I felt I could have been more nurtured during my experience (of course this is just my perception of it) and also down to teaching smaller children and then teaching adult from specialist population groups who were not trainin

I had a really interesting - lets call it a 'debate' at my part time workplace today. It isn't a dance based environment but it allowed me to reflect through the conversation about knowledge and experience. It seemed from looking at different rituals, to marriage and civil partnerships, right through to feminism and that is where it got less enjoyable. We spoke about sexual assault and how I believed it was more prominent that women were sexually assaulted and a video I had seen which highlighted some lack of equality between men and women by asking a question to a group of men and afterwards a group of women; what steps do you take on a daily basis to prevent yourself from being sexually assaulted? The men laughed nervously and a few people said 'don't go to prison' and things like this. But the summary of it was that they didn't really think about it. The same question was asked of women, who started to mention a lot of various things; don't go r

Hi everyone - I already had my blog up and running from my undergrad so these posts have been a bit backwards apologies! My name is Chrissie, I am currently working part time as a dance and vocal lecturer at a Southampton based college and the rest of the time I work as a Health Practitioner at a cardiovascular prevention service. I trained professionally at The Hammond School of Dance where I disciplined in Musical theatre, various dance styles, acting and singing. I have taught freelance dance and fitness classes for many years and have taught adults up to 60 and children from pre primary. I have worked with specialist population groups and vulnerable adults, and children with autism. I have worked in community centres, colleges, schools, universities and dance centres, each with its own unique learning experience for me. I did my undergrad distance learning at Middlesex and I really struggled with it until the last module we did. I did not do well at engaging in blogs and ke

Just had a quick look through the claims to prior learning handbook and found a good blog of Helen's from last year, read it here.... http://helenkindred.blogspot.com/2017/09/ I think this module will be a lot about where I am right now and how my past experiences have got me here. From this I thought I'd start by creating a little mind map of what I've been part of during my dance journey. It actually made me feel really proud of everything I've achieved so far as a dance teacher. The course start has also come at a time when I've been offered my first work as a dance lecturer at a college too. So I'm very excited to use what I learn during my teaching in my MA studies. I have come to realise that outcomes don't necessarily have to be used to verify you as a person and what value to bring to jobs/studies/family/friends/anything in life. But it is hard to remember this sometimes. Tomorrow I'm running my first half marathon and I'm real

We just had our introductory chat on Skype to start the term off. It was good to familiarise myself with Myunihub again and to go through the basics. Something new I've learnt... if the text book you want from Middlesex library isn't available as an online textbook, it can be arranged that the book is posted to you on loan! Brilliant. I finished my undergrad in January so I feel like I have had a big gap in learning but I'm keen to start reading our module handbooks and to start making notes... I always like my handbooks to printed off so I can highlight and annotate on paper... anyone else find this? I start my new job in a few weeks as a dance teacher at a college as well, and along with new housemates, a new haircut and the MA starting, my brain is at full capacity for 'change'. But I'm looking forward to utilising a study plan as that's definitely something I lacked in during my undergrad. How do you all see your pattern for studying working? It wi

I taught and filmed my Professional Artefact last night, and whilst I had not planned on blogging about it, I felt it was a really important part of my learning experience, bringing different elements of my learning together. Whilst I originally just planned to do a solo piece of choreography that I would perform, the idea of doing a group piece resonated with me because I wanted to show the importance of other people in my inquiry experience. After booking a space I asked any friends I knew were interested in dance or were professional dancers if they would be interested in the project. Some of my friends who came along had very limited dance experience, but I thought this sat well with my inquiry findings as I want dance to be as accessible as possible for everyone, so I was really happy I had such a range of abilities to work with. We had two hours to get everything done and everyone worked extremely hard to get the choreography ready for filming in that time. It was a challen