MA Dance Pedagogy

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

I was just reading reader 2 and the section on Kottcamp's idea of on-line and off-line engagement. I like the idea of reflection in action. I use it during my workout classes; if my class are over exerting themselves I will perform a speech test (usually means I get them to whoop) and if they can't, I immediately know I have to make the next song a lot slower to give them a chance to get their breath back. Also it's the same for if I noticed they were finding the class too easy and weren't sweating I would make the next few songs killer! But essentially it's about recognising the needs of my class and acting on that and adapting immediately, rather than going home and thinking 'maybe that class was too easy/hard? ' because ultimately by then I may have lost a client due to them not enjoying my class. After this section the reader asks for a few ideas I like and to do a bit of critical thinking on them. I may not be at my most critical at this time but I

I wanted to take a look at some of the dance origins of Zumba dancing. Being an instructor I get a wealth of music sent to me each month in many different styles to create dances too. The amazing thing is that although when you first go to a Zumba class you may only remember dancing/jumping around and whooping for an hour, the instructor has (hopefully) put in a good amount of work to create that class for you. A Zumba class is specified by having a mix of lots of different world rhythms to dance to; so you can't just do 12 salsa tracks - because you'd be teaching a salsa class unfortunately. And in your training you learn the basic steps to these world rhythms which you then add into your choreography. So although some of these dances originated from the late 17th century - we are still using the same dance moves today! In your Zumba Basic Training you are taught 4 rhythms; Merengue, Salsa, Cumbia and Reggaeton. Of course there are plenty more to talk about (Calypso, Samba,