MA Professional Practice, Dance- Jesse Milligan

Last Sunday's Skype session saw, what I felt, was a very difficult and thought provoking discussion on communicating ones ideas. The discussion revolved around the different ways one communicates their ideas throughout this course and how they grow through each module. One aspect which I feel resonated with most of us were the differences in communicating our own views and opinions within our work and the communication of other peoples ideas and theories. These seemed to differentiate between the formal citing of theories and frameworks and the informal personal views and reflections. It seemed key to making these areas work in harmony within your work was to not see them in isolation but rather as a fusion of voices. This fusion appears to become more apparent as the course progresses from our RPL claims in module one, our research proposals in module two and the research project, professional artifact and presentation in module three. One idea I felt was that the time in betw...

On Monday evening we had a skype session on ethics, with a focus on the MORE form process within our research proposal. We discussed how it was particularly important to understand the differences between Ethical Considerations and Ethical Processes; something I feel I may have misunderstood in the drafting of my first research proposal. Ethical Considerations are the thoughts of the enquirer regarding how their research methods may impact it's participants. Whether through questionnaires, interviews or observation, it is important to consider if your modes of inquiry may implicate it's participants, put them in a stressful or demanding situation or have a negative impact. In the selection of participants one may even be inadvertently causing exclusion or dis-justice to various other groups. Ethical Processes are the actions and processes one may go through in-order to avoid any negative impacts as mentioned above. This may include ensuring confidentiality or anonymity of p...

Sunday's monthly MAPP discussion group revolved around the topic of 'knowing and learning' within our practice and within the course. The conversation gravitated towards two different schools of thought in relation to learning: Learning in order to be assessed. Learning in order to grow and gain perspective on your knowledge. We established that the majority of learning is undertaken with the aim of eventually being assessed on how much of that knowledge is retained and replicated. This rung truths with most of the dance teachers in the discussion as they admitted that within their practice more emphasis is placed on preparing students for examination of a set syllabus despite the teachers themselves finding more reward in seeing their students grow and apply knowledge learnt to their own bodies in a unique way. This drew parallels with something I am currently reading about as I start Module Two: Positivist and Non-Positivist approaches (which I will be blogging a...

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...

Sunday's monthly MAPP discussion saw us reflect on the subject of theories and framework, not just in our learning or professional practice but as our lives as a whole. Theories are a part of everything we do and on reflection it seems as we become more experienced in our field, we come into contact with many more theories that we can either choose to adopt or strengthen the use of our existing theories. Continued exposure to and questioning of different theories can lead to a growth in the framework that one adopts in their daily practice. But what defines a framework and how large a part of our lives does a framework encompass? We discussed that frameworks can cover huge areas of our lives and that the frameworks we see in our everyday lives can relate to and be part of even larger frameworks, for example: the world we live in could be classed as a framework and within that you have much smaller frameworks such as evolution or human development.; similarly to a child wh...

In a blog post by Adesola Akinleye, Connectivism is looked as a fundamental feature of the MAPP course. Akinleye uses two theorist's ideas on connectivism to establish how they are linked to our practice within dance. George Siemens sees connectivism as a means for a more socially connected process of learning that can eliminate a contrived instructivist or self-regulated approach. This can take many levels; at a biological level where neurons are firing and forming new connections to networked learning where one takes concepts and applies them to their pre-established understanding to form conceptual connections. Most commonly connectivism is seen everyday in networked learning from external social platforms (blogs, social media etc.) This Combinatorial Creativity can be applied to how dance has evolved over time. At a biological level, a sense of movement is instilled in everyone at birth and dance has been seen in the earliest of records. As dance has evolved, networked lear...