MA Professional Practice, Dance- Jesse Milligan

Adesola's blog post "John Green - The Test - capacity to make connections." asked us to consider the role of arts or creative thinking in education. As I embark on module two I am looking carefully, not only at the course content that lies ahead, but also the qualities I possess (often without knowing) that can be of most use to me on the MAPP programme and that I can incorpor ate into further learning. The TED talk Adesola introduces to us in her blog shows Cindy Foley discussing the importance of creativity in education. In it Foley says that more increasingly creativity is being touted as the key to student success, economic growth and general happiness and she further advocates that the key to this creativity are three key traits that often come naturally to artists: Comfort with Ambiguity. Idea Generation. Transdisciplinary Research. On reflection and comparison to my own practice, I came to the realization that these are qualities that as I dancer I h...

Friday saw the first Skype session of the 2019/20 academic year consisting of a welcome induction by Adesola Akinleye. Akinleye proceeded to introduce everyone and familiarize new students with aspects of the course and also myunihub. I feel an orientation of myunihub is always helpful regardless of where you are in the course as the maze of a system can always confuse even the most experienced of users. Looking at the semester ahead and future assignments and deadline the same daunting feeling I felt at the beginning module one started to come across me, so it was good to be amongst peers new and old to remind myself that this was all part of the learning process. The usual anxieties of juggling the MAPP workload with professional/ family commitments arose during discussion and when Akinleye was asked how many books we need to be reading for each module she reminded us that the course isn't about reading a set number of texts but rather making meaning of your professional prac...