URGENT SKYPE conversations groups

I need you send me request for contact on SKYPE and / or email me your SKYPE  addresses so I can contact you. It would be great to have sorted that out before Tuesday / Wednesday. Please email me the information.

How have you constructed your thoughts about...

This post is about looking at what three things mean to you and how you can interact with them:

A)    What it means to work when doing a work-based learning course,

B)   What campus sessions are / mean

C)   Notes about stuff on posts

I am starting with (C) – I am really excited about the SKYPE group calls plan see my post last week. If you want to do it my SKYPE address is in the handbook. This blog is open to anyone and everyone because I think the idea of open access is interesting and education needs to work out how to engage with the idea. But I don’t want my SKYPE address to be open access!! So I am not posting it, just look in the handbook. I have at least one person for each module discussion BUT for a group we need more than one so join in.. 

Looking at Blog posts this week I read Rhoda’s blog post about how much data she has. I think it’s really useful and not just because she mentions me!!! Have a look and leave her a comment on what you think.

http://rakparker.blogspot.com

Looking at (B). This relates to the open access ideas I hate to endorse too much use of Wikipedia but for the common understanding of something it is useful. Here’s what they say about open access.   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

What do you think?

The philosophy of this course has something to do with the changes in how we can understand learning, information, knowledge and connection that the inter-net has raised. We see these issues in our everyday social life and work life. We begin the course by flagging it up, but this is for more than just how to get noticed for the next audition it is about thinking about how we interact and connect with each other. On this course we have decided to come together in the web 2:0 ‘world’ it seemed that because people are working or looking for work in the professional arena that the Internet offers two interesting concepts that we can use. Firstly, connection with each other out side of time and space as we usually use it. I am writing now, about things I care about and hopefully connecting with you but you are not ever in the same time or space as me even though we connect. Before internet maybe we could use a letter in this way to some extent but a letter requires a physical object that travels the distance between us. From my time and space to yours – the internet offers another way to address time and space. I am interesting this because of my work in embodiment.

So the internet and the blogs and lib-guides are our shared point of connection. That’s what that’s about – what do you think? How have to understood what the blogging is all about? You can see that from the perspective I have just described it is really important you post on your blog and comment on others. It is how you participate. So the campus sessions are not the places where we give you information that is on the web in Lib-guides, group emails & blogs. The campus sessions are places where we can come together to talk about what we think of the information. We then share out what we found. So not coming to a campus session is not about missing important information it is about missing connecting in a particular way – in physical person. You my be someone who needs this or likes to work that way but other than feeling sad about not working in your preferred way you are not missing key information. I think the coming together of people to talk is really fun and interesting. One of my advisees was really worried about missing a campus session and that is what made me think we should think of other ways to interact together in conversation – hence the group SKYPE idea (see previous post).

This course is not about us giving you information and you telling us back what we said. It is about you pulling the information and meaning toward you through a range of sources and us nurturing and encouraging that process. We are here to help you find meaning and value in the information. So not coming to a campus session does not mean you miss having us inject you with information.

How do you see the campus sessions? How are you finding the connections you make on the course with peers with advisors, with the handbooks, with other people’s literature….etc…?

Point (A) It’s a work-based learning course. To me that means work is central (your professional practice) so the course should not be an either /or situation: study or work. The point is you are studying your work. If you get offered a job while on this course do not see it a conflict – I mean maybe we are doing a good job of helping you open yourself to new possibilities and deeper thought and that has shifted your approach to something in a positive way or made you more attractive to employers. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that as you open the door into deep thought around your practice you get a job!!! Of course I am not saying you are validated by a paid job but think about the experience and see how things connect.

Of course work out with your advisor any admin problems if you are worried about getting work posted off for deadlines or less internet access but we are all imaginative people we can make it work. The opportunity is that the work will add experience to your study at MDX and the study at MDX with add depth to your work. That is point. If you are not finding that synergy then think about it because that is why we ask you to centre around your professional Practice in the work you hand in for assessment. Part of this course is about placing yourself in your work context, better understanding what you bring to your practice what your influences are, what you want to know more and more about. How have you seen the relationship between ‘work’ and ‘study’ so far? Have you noticed work informing study and study informing work? What is your experience in this?

Please comment

Keep up the good work

Adesola

SKYPE group calls

Well, the SKYPE experiment when well on Tuesday. It seems we can have groups of four or five to talk together. We can't see each other (without the supper-dupper SKYPE package) but it is the group conversation that is nice. I am thinking about this in terms of people who can't make campus sessions. BUT the problem is you students are pretty slow on the blog post reading!!!! not many people responded to my last post.  So I am giving you a bit of time to read this before some trial group discussions:
I am going to try to have:
a module one group discussion March 5th at 7pm (London time for those on tour etc..)
a module two group discussion March 5th 8:30pm
a module three group discussion March 6th 8:30pm

Whose wants to join in???
Adesola

Trying out an idea

Hi
I want to try out using SKYPE to have a group virtual Campus session!!! I need four or five people who want to give it a go. I was thinking about doing a trial on Tuesday 19th at 7:30 British time. It is particularly for those people not in UK or London or people who have to work during the day. Campus sessions are like think-tanks where students get to talk about common issues, ideas experiences and then we blog about this to the wider community. If you don't make a campus session it does not mean you are missing out on information it is just the experience of meeting and chatting live with peers. However for those on tour or just have work conflicts etc... getting to Hendon can be difficult. The part you are missing is the talking live to peers part, so this little experiment address that. If it works ok then we can do it more... Who wants to give it a go. Please leave a comment and if you want to help send me a SKYPE request so I have your address.
Adesola

How you are experienced -

Hi

Here are some thoughts sparked by Module One, first task. Module Twos and Module Threes please read this because these are not thoughts in terms of tips for passing Module One, they are ideas about the layers you can find in the work. Don’t think of a module ending and that’s it. The ideas introduced in each module has something to offer whatever stage you are at. Ideas are introduced in a module as tools ways of looking at things. These are tools we are hoping you will use on-goingly; throughout this course and into your work arena and beyond your time at Middlesex!!

So I am looking at some ideas introduced in Module One, but this should be relevent to everyone on the course.

The CV

We ask you to use your CV as a starting point for posting / thinking about introducing yourself and what your experiences is. Page 11 in the Module One handbook states.

‘You should take your current professional CV and rewrite as a profile improving on its quality and Upload this as your blog profile.’

Why are we asking you to do this: because we want you to start to see your Self in different contexts. To see yourself beyond how you were positioned in your prior learning environment and start to see yourself in terms of the different parts of YOUR life. Part of doing this is to start thinking about what you ‘have done’ which is what a CV narrates. See my previous blog posts on this.

Positioning of Self

http://www.adesolaa.blogspot.com/2010/10/positioning-of-self.html

(October 10^th 2010)

(Re-thinking this might be really useful people starting Module Two to give your self a ‘what have I just done moment’ and to contextualise any feedback you have just got from the work you just handed in (your assessed work)).

So here is what is happening for me. I feel really uncomfortable that you could feel encouraged  to just post your ‘audition’ CV. I don’t like the details such as dress size, you  SHOULD NOT post your street address as most CVs have at the top. I think it is kind-a icky to have some of those details which are about costume fittings or ‘look’ (like brown eyes etc…) on your blog which is open access to anyone who finds it. But then you are not being asked to do this directly because how relevant is that kind of CV to this context. I want to encourage you to think about the message and appropriateness of the CV you post in the context of an open-access, learning blog.

Hopefully you will look at it and develop something new for this context. The ‘about me’ part of the Blog sort of serves as a CV area too. You could post about the process you took and use the actually CV you develop as your ‘About me’ content. The point is to question what it will be like for people coming across your blog. What experience will they have of you, since the blog might be the only experience they have of you. It is not just what you want to say because you know much more of the story behind the intentions you have as you make your blog. It is also about stepping ‘outside’ yourself to imagine how you are experienced. THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF ETHICS.

A chunk of Ethics is introduced in Module Two so module Twos and Threes what do you think of the above in terms of how you are approaching ethics?

Although formally introduced in Module Two it is sooooooo important to note that everything we do, every decision we make has something to say within the realm of ethics. Because experience is transactional there is inter-play you are experienced as something… ethics is about looking at how you or what you create or do are experienced.

In this case you can ask yourself questions about why you chose the photo you chose to represent you on your blog. Does it actually look like you? Is it what you were told was a good headshot? Did you choose it because you like to think of yourself that way? What does it say about what you want to appear as? How you want to be experienced? How is it an ‘ethical’ representation of you??? what other things have you considered: are you put off posting on your blog because of your spelling and you don't want spelling mistakes to represent You? What things do you consider in other contexts (at auditions, at work...). do you think to think of yourself as a 'good' person!

You can ask similar questions about how you construct a CV for your blog. What pressures do you feel you have to conform to? Where is honesty in the representation of your Self? Is it possible to represent your Self ever? Is it more about learning to being what people want you to be in different parts of your life? 

Module Twos these questions are important to you because you are starting to take your ideas (questions) out beyond your own Reflective work (journals and blog posts) and looking at literature, peers and other professionals to see what they think – but at the same time you can be thinking about these questions of representation, transaction, how things are experienced through thinking about how much value you put in information from different people because of how they appear to you. How you experience them. How much you and what you put out alters what you receive / perceive.

Module threes this resonates with you because of course you are starting to be out in the field talking, interviewing reading and you can think about how much of You, you are gathering and how much of the ‘other person’ or ‘other’ idea it is possible for you to gather. How does the way to approach people change what you see or hear in them? I do not think you are looking for a neutral way to do this but instate to note down the impact you think you have on an encounter as being as important as the conversation / information you get from an encounter.

So what do you think? How has this post come across?? What do you think of thinking of ethics as ‘How you are experienced’?

Adesola

Starting up

Hi

Welcome back returning students and welcome new people. As you start to organise yourself and read the handbooks I hope you will get going blogging and commenting. I am writing a quick blog on citations requested by Mel. Module Twos and Threes are thinking about their feedback. As you start it is a good time to look at your work with fresh eyes. If you are new starting Module One now is a good time to read through other peoples blogs and see what people have been doing and thinking.

We use the Harvard system. The idea of a citation is that you are letting the Reader know where you got an idea or quote from. It is making sure you recognise the places things come from. It also allows the Reader to go and find out more about that idea or the rest of the quote because they know where it came from. This is how they know you write the name of the person who said it and the date of the publication they said it in just after you mention it (for example (Smith 2012)). If it is a quote you also write the page number (for example Smith, 2012 p.65). Now the Reader has what they need to be a detective.

First they go to the end of your writing to the bibliography. There you will have written the longer version. The name of the person is first (Smith) so they can find the name you had in the text and then they check the date (2012). Smith might have written a number of things that you have quoted at different times so there maybe a (Smith, 2007) as well. Then the rest of the long citation in the bibliography tells us the name of the book and who published. The whole point of all of this is that the Reader can go to the library and get the same book you were looking at. Then they can turn to the page (p.65) and read what you read that led you to write about the idea in your paper. It is all about giving the write information so we can have the same (reading) experience as you.

If you quote someone – even if you have just said something about that person you still have to use a citation at the end of the quote, anyway you need to put the page number as well.

For example:

James Smith writes about cows in his book ‘I love milk’. Here he is point out that grass is really important.

‘It was green and beautiful and fed the cows very well’ (Smith, 2012 p.65)

Also see past posts:

Adesola's BA PP blog: What Sam and Billy say: What Sam and Billy say

What Sam and Billy say

Writing about experiences...

Looking forward to a great term everyone

Adesola

In the nicest posible tone....

For all modules there are different things you are asked to give us for assessment. BUT in each module what you hand-in is linked it is not a load of independent documents. In Module One you are making a portfolio telling one thing. In Module Two you are telling one thing: about a plan that is linked to your practice and will complete your BA. In Module Three you are telling us about one thing; a Research project. But because life is multi-layered you maybe handing different aspects or parts of the one idea but they are all linked in telling the same story of each module.

All the work we are doing on linking experiences, networks, reflection why would we then ask you to chop things up and not relate things to each other. In some cases – like Module Three you are asked for a document and then there is a brake down of each section but they are part of the same thing!!

The sections are like the way a book has chapters each chapter has a particular part of the story but they relate to each other to make a whole picture. The sections are like chapters of a book each section has its part but they are put to together to make the who report.

For everyone please remember that the assessment work is not a load of hoops we want you to jump through to get the prize of passing. We want to understand what you have been doing, we want you to be able to articulate it in away that anyone teaching at BA level will understand and also at a level where you can tell other people about your work in your professional world. Why would we want to read the same thing repeated again and again in different short documents that don’t relate to each other? I guess I would hope that you could see we are not trying to give you tasks like hero’s in a fairytale that get more and more difficult to see if you deserve a BA. All the work we do about web 2:0 in Module One shows that of course you can find the ‘knowledge’, ‘information’ but what is its value/ meaning. What makes it important is the unique view/ ideas/ experiences you have had and how you give it meaning. That is most important and then it is important that your special voice on the topics can be heard and there are standard ways for people to hear you; the guide-lines for how the work is to be submitted is just so you have experience in presenting your voice in away that will be heard in the establishment of a university setting because a BA is a university artefact.

Please try to make sense of what you are doing. At the beginning of each module we ask you to take a leap of faith into the ideas and activities but by the end do not be doing things because you think you have been told to, have a reason for doing them for yourself also. If you need to grab hold of that meaning and its slips away talk to your advisor that is what they are there for. There is no secret society holding the knowledge: we want you to do your best, do well this world needs all the brilliant, fulfilled people it can get.

Most people are doing this but just a reminder:

Put your name on your work – simply so we know who its from

Put page numbers on it – simply so we know the order of things

Put things together – so that you link your learning particularly to you and your practice.

Use words you know the meaning of

Check the meaning is what you think it is, not just how it is used in Metro or the Sun

Don’t rely on one word to give meaning to a whole sentence – write to illuminate ideas.

Feel you are a part of something: your interesting voice within the context of hundreds of others in books and journals too. 

Respect yourself and what you think by presenting it clearly and respect yourself by respecting the work others have done. If you thought it then probably someone else has too. Find your published soul-mates: what they brought to the ideas you are interested in too. Don’t reinvent the wheel find out about the wheel.

OK then

!!!!

Adesola

Writing about experiences...

Busy writing drafts about your experiences this term? I will make this a short post to tickle your thinking (or not). The work asked for, for assessment for all three modules asks you to recognise your unique experience, within a context / environment of the activities you undertook this term; knowing they are connected also to your past and your anticipated future. We are asking you to be reflective about meaning and knowledge by considering yourself as environment, history, future hopes, and actions – a unique matrix of experiences.  Here are some favourite quotes:

 “A body is not so much a thing, as it is an act- an act made possible, to be sure, by the physicality of the organism performing it, but not identical or reducible to the organism’s physicality.” ( Sullivan 2001 p.29)

“Truth occurs when humans and their environments respond to and transact with one another in such a way that flourishing is achieved for both. Truth is not a matter of humans “fitting” their beliefs to the world. Nor is it a matter of matching internal representations to external reality.” (Sullivan 2001 p.144)

So we are asking what just happen (last term)? But how can anyone know? We are asking you to take your best reflective self and look at the different ways you could understand the activity you undertook. In doing so look at where ‘you’ are in that.  I chose these quotes even though I don’t believe we can understand (or even recognise)  ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ but I do think there is a beauty in our attempts.

Sullivan, S. (2001) Living across and through skins : transactional bodies, pragmatism and feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Developing a picture

I know everyone is busy so I have marks sections 'Module One', 'Two' and 'Three' but as always try to read the whole post. Something I think is useful to a Module One might be just what you needed to think about in Module Three. We are all connected.

Module One's

You will be thinking about the portfolio that you are handing in for assessment. At this point in the module you are starting to reflect on the whole activity. Although you did things in sections the portfolio is asking you to present an overview or summary of what you have learnt. I find it very hard to do this if I start at the beginning of something in terms of time, and work my way to the present day. In other words if you start your Critical Reflection with talking about task 1a and finish with the last task it is hard to give a meaningful overview of anything but a schedule. This is because your learning probably did not develop one thing after the next. Some ideas might have 'clicked' straight away, some might have 'clicked' and them you found deeper meaning to them later. Some may not until next module!!! It is unlikely it was a step a-b-c sort of process. I don't believe in linear constructs anyway, and I don't think learning is like that. So trying to tell the story of your learning as a straight timeline is very difficult. But everyone has their own way of doing things. In the post below I talked about different approaches. I find organizing what I want to say into themes works best for me. Think about which works for you? Give yourself time to try writing your final Critical Reflection a couple of different ways. Just like with the reflective journal there are many ways to write about the same events. Remember also we are looking for links to ideas from other people - citations from books, journals, articles etc... that have had an impact on the way you looked at your activity in this first module. Have a look at:

Assessment portfolio

http://adesolaa.blogspot.com/2010/11/assessment-portfolio.html

Module Two's

I love this video because it talks to the importance of analysis see paragraph below. But it is also about how important it is to create a research model that has thought about the effect your activity has on the people you interact with. Thinking from the perspective that they have their own story and you are just a small part (maybe a 10 minute encounter) of something much bigger than you could know. THAT is what ethics is about - thinking about how others will experience what you have created. This video shows how if you do not think about this you will limit what you can hear from them. You will limit what you hear to what you expect them to say. I would love you to comment on what is wrong in the video in terms of research in the comments below. 

Study: Most Children Strongly Opposed To Children’s Healthcare

Module Three's

I cannot stress enough that the inquiry is NOT about collecting data it is about analysis (see film above). The inquiry hangs on what you do with the data. That's not just re-writing what people said or putting what they said into a beautiful chart. It is about you thinking about what it means informed by your unique experience, the literature you have been reading and the experience of having been there when the data collection was happening, oh and what was said!! have a look at this post too.

Weeks 6,7,8 & 10 (Module three particularly)

http://adesolaa.blogspot.com/2012/03/weeks-678-10-module-three-particularly.html


So what do you think? 
Love your comments
Adesola

What Sam and Billy say

Hi I am going to address a question Alicia asked on her blog “when quoting my interviewees, how do I do it..?”

The idea of a citation for a book etc... is so that when we read your work we can then go and find the book (journal etc...) you had in your hand that you cited from. But the interviews are data you collected and we cannot go and find them somewhere. You are using quotes form interviewees as examples of something you are writing about, so it is a bit different from a citation for book (etc...) which is pointing us towards further reading or bringing to mind a theorised idea by someone else. So assuming you have given an outline of what you research looked like. [ie you interviewed six professional dancers. Billy works in UK, Jamie in Mexico etc... and any other relevant information we need to know about them while respecting their anonymity.] Then when you write about something they said you can write

'it's a long way to go to go to an audition' - Billy

So now a notes about quoting people in terms of the above:

First: the decision to give them names – many people say participant (1) or participant B. This is ok but think about the topic of your research. If it about people's experiences or feelings etc… then it is ok to present them as real people. Not labelled like test-tubes. If it’s a test-tube based data collection process then naming them A, B or C makes more sense. If you use names think about the implication of gender and cultural background a name can give.

Second, as I mention above take a moment  in the overview of the research project in your account to let us know who and where and how you collected the data so we can see any comments in the context of the inquiry. For instance some of my interviewee might be college students and other professional dancers and other teachers.

Third,  DO NOT use the quote to make your point. Make the point and then use the quote to give an example of what you are talking about.

'Most dancers I spoke to talked about the importance of auditions in terms of keeping current with what was going on, but also pointed out that there needed to a balance between the keeping current and the expense of preparing and traveling to an audition. 

'I live in Gistone (small village in the North of England) and most auditions I am interested in are in the South. its a long way to go to travel to an audition.' Billy (professional dancer)

Billy's comment underlined Smiths (2009) theory that dancers in the outside of major cities are disadvantaged when it comes to audition experience. However, Sam the other professional dancer I interviewed from the North of England saw a trip down South for an audition as part of a larger goal. Sam used the time to also meet up with friends and visit museums.

'I try to make going to auditions only part of what i do in a day. That way I feel less pressure in the audition. Otherwise I'm like thinking if I don't get this I've wasted the fare down here and what-not.' - Sam (professional dancer). 

Smith (2009) has said that professional dancers start to see auditions as away of socialisation. It seemed that the professional dancers who lived outside of major cities..... 

Smith quote....'

The quotes from Participants should be indented but I can't see how to do that on the blog post page and my computer keeps crashing, so I'M trying to get this posted before it dies again - but enough of my problems!!!!

Back to the quotes-- as we read more and more quotes we also start to get a sense of the personalities of the participants - that is also why its nice to give them names; it is easier to remember who said what.

As you start to write what you are handing in for assessment in any of the modules start to let go of the drive to make a point (tell the truth) - and think of the actual document you are making as also a work of art. how you write, structure and form the essay is an art too. It is not just about what you are saying because how we understand what you are saying is more subtle then just the idea, it is how the words are put together. I am very aware of this as a dyslexic - and it often seems like a magic trick to even get words together in the first place but every now and then you might read something or see something and think that was really well done. Think about what you think is well written and why. Alan did a post about truth, that was interesting to read. I guess I am saying the same thing. Let's suppose there is more than one 'truth'. What you are thinking about when you write should not be presenting the 'truth' of what you found but capturing the nature of what you found or experienced.   

(Sensitivity to the whole process not just an account of past.)

What do you think? Does this help with the quote question?

Adesola

Action: doing, links

Hi

Here is a plug for something I am constantly saying . If you are sending something to someone via email imagine it on THEIR computer. They are not you.

 Example One: sending work to your advisor: So putting ‘Critical Review’ on it makes sense on your computer because you have only done one but your adviser has up to 20. The thing it is for your advisor is not a ‘Critical review’ it is a piece of work from you. SO PUT YOUR NAME ON IT and put your name on the work itself. 

Example Two: sending your CV to a producer. On your computer you may only have your CV so calling the file ‘CV’ helps you find it. But on the producers computer they may have 200 CV’s so what is important about it is that it is from YOU. Put your name on it.

I recommend your name_what it is_date or draft number.doc

=

AAkinleye_Introductiondraft_nov12.doc

When I look at work I send it back with

AA_ your name_ whatever you called it.doc

so you know that, that copy is the one I made comments on. Get it?

See blogs: Positioning of Self

OK its get it together time for what you will be handing in, try to let go of going to do a BA and get into doing a BA mode. Its ok not to be a perfect as you are in your head as long as you do something.

Please  think about citations enough said!!! Citations

 Module One’s start asking yourself how all the sections in module one link up and where you and your experience are in the links. Start to make notes about how you will writing your reflective essay. see: 

Positioning of Self (different from above)

Module Two’s commit to an idea and start to work out how you can best explore it. Nothing to prove just inquiry. see Question(aires)?

Module Three’s the handbook  (page 13)is really useful in giving you a structure for your ‘Critical review’:

·      Introduction of the Critical review

·      Evaluation of the inquiry process

·      Analysis of what you experienced (what you found / findings)

·      Critical reflection (of the whole situation including what you did and experienced)

aAlso look at: Weeks 6,7,8& 10 (Module three particularly)

and

http://www.adesolaa.blogspot.com/2009/09/why-research-analysis-is-so-important.html

Thought: Module ones this structure is not too different from how you would be planning your critical reflection too (only yours is shorter, more succinct).

So if you are a Module Two leave a comment of advice for a Oner. If you are a Three leave a comment for a two or One. If you are a One leave a comment for all of us.

I have tried to link past posts. See what people commented at the time (if they did!) then visit their blogs and see where they were at the time when they made the comment. This is why comments are so cool to leave people!

Keep your stick on the ice

Adesola

Why all this writing!!

I have been posting each day I was here for two main reasons. Firstly, in order to give you an idea of the range of research topics and methods that fall under the arts, and how you are a part of a large community of people who are working in dance (and across the arts) to open up inquiry across forms, risk asking difficult questions, and trust their own passion and interests enough to follow them. Secondly, as a new way (for me) to share my life experiences as part of my teaching practice, which is about how I believe that as I continue to engage in  my own reflective processes and growth I use my own lived experience as an example of 'what not to do' / or 'what to do' however you read my ideas! 

Adesola

Sunday (last day)

It has been the last day (half a day).

Last nights performance was really great. Yjastros (flamenco dance) was so amazing. It was as if passion took the form of sound in the singing and guitar and then vitality sadness, joy, life and death all bubbled in the skin and bones of the dancers and exploded into their movements. I was exhausted after watching.

Dancing Earth was also great, a beautiful performance that was made more layered by the gentle, clear reverence for the lived experience of being on this earth.

This morning there were two panels and a closing plenary. The first panel looked at the influence of language on gender identity in Breaking. It looked at how some dancers have moved away from the word ‘Breakdancing’ because of the commercialisation of the word to calling what they do b-boying but then what are the women doing then. Some call themselves b-girls but others feel that makes it seem as if what they are doing is a different kind of dance purely because they are girls doing it.

Then Melissa Hudson Bell gave a paper about the work of Amara Tabor Smith who uses the eating of food as part of the performance experience. I really enjoyed the paper and want to read it again because I was distracted during it by how it reaffirmed how much I love to create dance myself, that has a community based  / ethnographic based starting point. How much I love the idea of an audience being a part of a ritual hand-washing as they enter the performance space as Melissa described Amara’s work.

The last paper in this panel looked at Jarabe Tapatio: dances in Mexico that were taught as traditional dances. In many papers, this weekend, exploring dances from different countries I have heard about traditional dances that were designated ‘traditional’ but only taught or even created in twentieth century. The were all responses to governments wanting to establish or recreate an identity for the whole country for instance in Cambodia after 90% of the artists were killed during Khmer Rouge, Korea as a part of shaking off colonialism, in Mexico (as this paper explored) when the country was made up of a number of differing groups of people with different languages and customs. It made me think how powerful the arts are. Governments turn to them to give cohesion to their country – look at UK Olympics. Music and arts and dance are how we define who we are as a nation and yet when it comes to funding that importance does not seem to be echoed.

The second panel was about the different re-stagings of Einstein on the Beach (first paper) and the second paper was about the history of Breaking from early dancers to 1990 and pointing out the importance of video replication in how the dance spread across the globe. People videoed battles and then people in other countries or places or genders watched the videos and learnt a shared vocabulary that later when they came together gave then something in common. But Mary Fogarty was pointing out that many of the things they assumed they had in common in person were not there. She has published this paper and again I am going to read it again.

The closing Plenary was nice but I went into it very up and hopeful but at the end we talked about the separation between practice and theory which I don’t acknowledge. And I had felt others came from the same place so talking about it as something to strategise for made me question if people thought as I do as widely as I had assumed. For me my practice is my theory: it is how I understand the world.   

It has been great to meet so may interesting, interested people at the conference. 

Saturday (pm)

Today I went to a number of panels. I went to one about teaching dance in higher education. One paper was about teaching ballet from a feminist paradigm. We talked about how as a teacher you negotiate how the expected way to teach a technique might contradict your own principles. The question set by Gretchen Alterowitz was about teaching ballet without adhering to the power structures often associated with ballet, such as the teacher being the only voice in the room, assumptions about what beauty is and genderise movements. In order to teach in formed by a pedagogy that involves notions raised by feminist writers she draws on democratising techniques such as having students self assess, work in pairs, collaborate in meaning making, comment in class and link their experience in the ballet room with outside experiences. I thought about how rigours I am with my principles of teaching on BAPP and MAPP and how I do not fight half as hard to adhere to those principles in my practical teaching. I am planning to re-think many of my technique classes to see where I tacitly accept the rhetoric of the dance studio at the expense of my moral / ethical beliefs.

Another discussion was about assessment (particularly in choreography classes). Most of the room agreed that it was not so much the choreographic aesthetic that was assessed but the students transformative journey within the learning experience. This is how we assess BAPP and MAPP too. It is about the student articulating the learning they gain through the process of the course. I talked about how we had introduced the Professional Artefact at Middlesex in order to allow students to create a comment on their learning process within their own terms (and the terms of their profession).

I then went to a workshop run by a MFA student I had when I was guest teaching in USA last summer. She shared her whole process and really constructed a whole approach to contemporary dance informed by her ethnographic experiences of being Korean  born, having trained in “traditional’ dance and western forms of ballet and contemporary  (Graham). It was really interesting and inspiring.

After lunch I went to a roundtable talk about Jazz dance. What Jazz is? How it is taught again we had some deep conversations about the ontology of dance itself. The panel talked about how Jazz ‘takes you there’ and you can’t be afraid to go. You are one with the music feeling the beat in your body. Jazz is also its history linked to roots in Africa and yet at the same time defined by it experimentation with the ‘here and now’. I thought about how one teaches a style of dance (any style) where that is what it is to you a ‘style’. And you know that for someone else it is away of life – away to connect with the world. Do you say sorry I am not passionate enough about that to be a good teacher in it or do you turn to the codified version of it (and teach it as a process of accomplishing steps)?

The conference has really encouraged me to feel we are not alone at Middlesex in an insistence in deep reflective practices and links to ‘other subjects’ as part of the process of being a dancer. Particularly for me not to compromise my interests because things I am most passionate about (interested in) give me an energy to explore with rigour and brings deeper meaning to the work. Funny because its what I am constantly telling Module two and three students!!!!!

I am going to the performance tonight – looking forward to that.