"Seeing your Practice, seeing yourself" continued discussion...

After this weeks discussion my mind was left full but also empty with more questions and inquisitive thoughts running through my mind. Listening to a few people speak about their practice, thoughts on this module and time in our lives was very reassuring to me that I am having similar thoughts to a lot of you. 

A highlighted area for me was Ben speaking about the communication that he has between himself and his students and how reflecting back on this he has adapted the feedback and conversations he has with his students. From being a teacher on the side, I completely understand where Ben is coming from with his thoughts but I also think this could be adapted to fit into my professional dance job as well. Being in a company with 20+ dancers, communicating throughout our different rehearsal processes has really made me reflect and think how I adapt my communication to talk with each colleague. This has also led to me thinking about working abroad as I work in Germany but with only 2 Germans in the company it is a lot of different cultures that I am trying to immerse myself into, a very interesting topic for two of my AOLs. 

I have also been thinking on one AOL that Helen mentioned Having structure and framework. I have also thought that this fits into more than one aspect of my practice. As a dancer, I have reflected and noticed that I work a lot more effectively when I have a strict structure to follow, thinking this is from my West End background as a young adult where you have a harsh structure to ensure learning is completed to a certain standard by a certain date. I have worked with different companies where a more experimental process is used to rehearse, this allows us as dancers to work with the choreographer to come up with the movement. I found this process a lot harder to adapt to, spending a lot of time creating the choreography rather than having the material and just having to learn it, however this process did help broaden my mind and become more welcoming to this process of creating. 

Whereas as a teacher, I find structure for my lessons incredibly important as this allows me to know exactly what I want to teach for the class. Of course, this plan does get adapted whether if its that something needs more explaining to a student, or a different learning technique is required I still like to refer back to my plan. This also led me onto a thought from Schon. D "Educating the reflective Practitioner about the art of imitation, how my students would imitate my movement and the certain step not working for them and then needs physical adaption to work on their body...just another interesting thought to think about!

Thats a very long blog post, from a very full and inquisitive mind! Back to writing and thinking now!