Focus on Reflection

Reflecting on the recent Module One focus group Skype call:

A focus on reflection.

 

Helen guided us through a reflection on our reflection and process in writing this culminating module one essay. Key takeaways from our conversation include:

The Areas Of Learning essays look further back, whereas this Reflective Essay is really reflecting on your learning in this module -- the now. Be sure to differentiate that. Reflect on: What have you learned in the past 12 weeks? Reflect on theorists and literature. What do you want to communicate, what has been meaningful to you?

It is also easy to take the reflection we are doing and think, 'Where do I want to go with this reflection…' and be eager to want to jump to the next step, what happens next? But it is important in this essay, and consequently in our current learning, to hold back and focus on the present.
 

We spent a good time sharing with one another this concept of how failure and vulnerability is productive. These are the moments we reflect on and learn from the most. Being successful doesn't often involve reflection and learning. Success doesn’t teach you anything. It reiterates what you already know. Success should be defined as learning from being uncomfortable and challenged, although it may not feel great in the moment.

Sometimes we do not feel as though we are equipped with the necessary knowledge to succeed. It is important to approach learning in this module with intention. Do not let information come to me, but take the front seat and be authentic as a learner. How am I receiving this information, and how am I internalizing it? Taking ownership!

To conclude, Helen posed a helpful exercise to guide us in writing our reflection essay:

What are three bullet points you can list of helpful things from this module that you can extract and communicate to others (what was meaningful to you, what are you getting from the blogs, Skype calls, handbooks, texts/literature, reflecting on own practice):

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On "Areas of Learning" ...

Updating the Blog universe on where I stand within Module 1 / Areas of Learning Essays:

I had my first one-on-one Skype meeting with my advisor Adesola today. We went over my initial bullet point ideas for my Areas of Learning (AOL) essays before I went ahead and tackled the first drafts. Our conversation was enlightening and helped me re-think what constitutes as an AOL, and re-directed me on a track to better success.

What I had originally sent to Adesola was really more of a list of six accomplishments within my professional practice, with quotes from literature and articles that were related to these moments. What I misunderstood was that these accomplishments are merely titles of moments when I learned something, rather than an AOL itself. In some instances it sounded like I was just told to do something a certain way and I did it, with no context of what I had taken from that experience.

We took time to unpack each accomplishment, delving deeper into the learning that occurred, and the value of each learning: the "Why?" In one instance that was particularly helpful in unpacking, Adesola asked me: "If it is true that I had done this successfully, what would an unsuccessful version of this look like?"It helped me figure out what I had done uniquely to achieve a goal, and those steps I took to get there was the learning that took place.

I now identify four AOLs, and will make a new bullet point list of some potentially new texts that could go with it.

How are your AOL essays going? Did you face a similar challenge as I have? Different challenges? Any advice on tackling these drafts? I look forward to hearing any reactions and reading other updates!

Learning Life Through the Arts

| Week 1 |

Responding to a post from Adesola's blog this week, regarding learning life skills through the arts...

After watching John Green's "The Test" video, Adesola reminds us that Education is about (or at least, should be about) application, not being told what to do. I have always valued this in my learning experience, appreciating when my teachers (of any subject, especially maths and sciences) would teach the material with real life application, the why am I learning this. So I take this appreciation and apply it to my own teaching, making sure anything I teach has a practical relationship to my students' lives.

I am currently teaching a 9th grade Conditioning for Dancers course this year, the first time I have been tasked with this subject. As a part of the curriculum, there is a lot of anatomy terminology and kinesiology concepts I need to teach them and assess for understanding. It would be easiest to have them make a bunch of flashcards and purely work on memorizing these facts (vomiting facts, as I like to put it), and while flashcards are a helpful tool in learning, I work toward personal application. We do exercises with Therabands and body weight to isolate and feel muscles that we are learning about, discuss injury prevention when it comes to body alignment and mechanics, and identifying bones and planes of motion on our own bodies. While there is a high degree of "you have to know this material" in this course, I make the effort of reminding them the importance of why they are learning this material to begin with.

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Then, Adesola posed us with this prompt: Think about what your learning is. What does it mean to have learnt about life through being an artist or being in the Arts? What value do you put on creative skills to imagine, wonder, working out the capacity to make connections. These are skills we ask you to use as core to what learning means -- Art's Critical Value.

This instantly reminded me of my Arts in K-12 Education course I took as an undergraduate student, where we reflected on this very topic. There are many things that most artists can agree on, which are well said by the resource below:

The Kennedy Center's ARTSEDGE website says the arts teach students life skills necessary for the 21st century workforce:

Learning and Innovation Skills

• Creativity and innovation

• Critical thinking and problem solving

• Communication and collaboration

Information, Media and Technology Skills

• Information media literacy

• Media literacy

• Technology

Life and Career Skills

• Flexibility and adaptability

• Initiative and self-direction

• Social and cross-cultural skills

• Productivity and accountability

• Leadership and responsibility

"Problem solving is at the top of the list for good reason. Art rarely goes according to plan."

Dance, and any performing art, is fleeting. Merce Cunninham has famously been quoted of saying:

"You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive."

But along with the beauty of the fleeting moment, you have to constantly make count-to-count, moment-to-moment decisions when performing live. There are numerous variables that can go awry: costume or technical malfunction, ensemble error, staging or blocking issue, memory loss, etc. Dancers are constant problem solvers.

"Adaptability is part and parcel with arts learning. Learning how to adjust goes with the territory."

I am a company dancer with Re:borN Dance Interactive, a contemporary modern dance company that specializes in immersive/interactive installation performances. Performing in these works is constantly about adapting to the environment, the audience, the feedback. Every time I perform the same work, it is performed differently due to the necessity for adaptation. 

"Working well with others is an important component of 21st century readiness."

In any creative project with other professional dancers, or setting choreography on students, there is an inherent understanding that you have responsibilities that affect the rest of the ensemble. Where to be in space, what movements to execute, when to have the choreography memorized, etc. There is leadership, self-direction/ownership and accountability in the process. 

On another note, learning dance forms from cultures other than yours teaches appreciation of and ability to have another degree of understanding of others.

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Lastly, I watched Cindy Foley's TED Talk about Teaching Art versus Teaching to Think Like an Artist. In summary, she states that there is a problem in art education today: it is impacted by the standards and testing culture like all other disciplines, focusing on things and ideas that are concrete and able to test and assess. She says it needs to work on developing learners that think like artists: creative, curious, seek questions, develop ideas, and play. To teach for creativity, it should focus on embodying habits that artists employ:

• Comfort with Ambiguity (discomfort, not knowing)
• Idea Generation (play is essential here, to discover)
• Transdisciplinary Research (research that serves curiosity, across multiple disciplines)

Stella commented on this topic, challenging the idea of how comfortable artists really are with ambiguity. Are we comfortable with ambiguity in every situation, even non-creative environments? Or have we created a secure framework, one that allows for play with ambiguity because we are secure in the process, given secure tolls to navigate the insecure?

I had not thought about ambiguity revolving around the Process versus the Subject itself. When I teach the Choreography and Composition course for my 11th grade students, I teach them multiple possible processes for creating, traditions that have been carried down through generations from important dance pioneers. I stress to them that these are tools, not rules. Yes, I want them to explore how to create in these different processes, but it is important that these are not the way to make dances. That would kill creativity. That would kill potentially new innovative ways to create.

Sir Ken Robinson claims that the traditional schooling system is causing kids to grow out of creativity. Perhaps this is why. There is a framework being built that tells them this is how to be creative, how to be an artist, when in "real life," it is not. Children shy away from creativity because they are taught there is a right and wrong way, what good art looks like and what is wrong. However, infants and toddlers do not shy away from creativity because they are not yet taught the idea of framework to be creative.

Stella compared this to her early interest in maths, because of the clear, distinct "wrong versus right" that you achieve when arriving to a solution. This made me think of my students when progress report grades come out every few weeks. They get upset when they don't get an "A" on a movement assessment, because of course in their minds an "A" is correct and anything else means it is wrong. If everyone got 100% perfect A grades, what is there to strive and work for? Does a 100% perfect dancer exist out there? Is it even attainable? Sure, with an explicitly clear rubric it may be more achievable, but is there really ever a performance in which you could have done nothing to make it better?

Isn't training to be a dancer training to constantly become a better you?

Induction Reflection

We have just completed our first Skype induction meeting, and Adesola led us through a review of using UniHub as our go-to resource for handbooks, links, and all things MAPP.

To learn something new, you have to realize that you don't know something, and you have to grasp that.

As a newcomer to the program, it was comforting to hear the support from my faculty supervisor and peers from the other side of the world who have already completed the first module. It was stressed to us that "to learn something new, you have to realize that you don't know something, and you have to grasp that." On that note, it is essential to know how to access the tools and resources that will help you do the learning (starting with UniHub). 

Marianella generously shared with us her experience and advice as we enter Module 1: Go deep into what you already know and really like, what you want to research more about. There's too much information out there that it can be overwhelming, and to focus in on what intrigues you.

Other important takeaways include the importance of keeping blog posts up-to-date and using the comment function to interact with the learning community. This, and the group Skype sessions, are not required, but are helpful to bounce off ideas and hear other perspectives. Those with more engagement get the most out of this program. I have been a firm believer in the saying, "what you put in it is what you get out of it," regarding any kind of learning or experience. This is no exception.

I look forward to continuing conversations with you all (and my self, through this blog) on this next chapter of learning in my dance teaching career.