5a: Codes of Practice in the Professional Community

Whether you are in a dancing in a studio at College, an open class or in a company, rehearsal space and the ethics that apply are so important. It is having a space that is safe and prevents injury, as well as providing the dancers and choreographers with what they need. As a dancer with Chrysalis London, we often rehearse in different places in London although the same work ethics are applied to each venue. These ethics, or codes of practice, are as follows. 

·         Well ventilated room

·         Well-lit room

·         Clean, (not polished or slippery), sprung floor

·         No obstacles à pillars, uneven floors, split water

·         Access to toilets

·         Ensure there is a First Aid Kit

·         Healthy and Safety policy and fire/emergency procedures

·         Changing facilities for male and female

·         Plug sockets – no wires sticking out

·         Access to clean water

·         Studio space

There are also codes of practice that apply to the dancers as well.

·         Abide by health and safety rules

·         Self-awareness

·         Ensure there is enough space to dance

·         Warm up to avoid injury, you are preparing your body

·         Cool down to allow your heart rate to settle down back to normal, prevent muscle pain                 or injury

·         Dance etiquette

·         Be responsible

·         Appropriate footwear and clothing

·         Be aware if you know you have any health issues or injuries

·         If you feel unwell or in pain stop or limit the movement that is causing you discomfort.

These are all the points I can think of for now, if I have left anything off feel free to leave       any comment below! 

Environment

Moving on to environment, I made another mindmap to see potential ideas, themes and links I could use for my inquiry. Environment is aiding to a learning organization. Whether you are sitting in a classroom, a dance studio or in a park, you are surrounded by environmental information. A factor so important to learning is the environment, supposedly positive and enriching. “Environments that produce positive emotional states can be expected to facilitate learning and the development of place attachment” Ken A. Gratz.

Looking at the mindmap I created, I began by researching definitions of the word environment.

·         “The surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal or plant operates”.

·         “The natural world as a whole or in a particular geographical area, especially as affected by human activity”.

I began thinking about the different environments I have been involved in and how they have differed from each other.  The three places I decided to compare were my junior and senior school Notting Hill and Ealing High School, Tring Park School for the Performing Arts and Chrysalis London. As well as wanting to compare similarities and differences to how I learnt, I also want to document how I adapted to each environment. There are obvious differences, such as being in an all girls’ academic school to being at a full time Performing Arts college but I also want to show how these environments have moulded myself as a person and a Professional Dancer. Stemming from original question, I want to use experience, research and practitioners to determine “What the Perfect Learning Environment is”.

Professor Michael Eraut is a leading researcher in the UK into how professionals learn in the workplace. His research has found that most learning occurs during normal working processes and that there is a substantial extent for recognising and enhancing this learning. He is continuously working to develop new lines of research to help us understand the nature of learning better.

Eraut warns people that, “unlike teaching organisations, learning is not the main aim of most workplaces. Most workplace learning is informal and occurs as a by-product of engaging in work processes and activities”. You learn by doing. His writings point to the importance of learning opportunities at work. He has said that the “key variables in characterizing the section for any particular type or aspect of performance are likely to be:

·         The contexts in which the performer can currently operate

·         The conditions under which the performer is able to work competently, e.g. degree of            supervision, pressure of time, crowdedness, availability of resources

·         The situations which the performer has handled capably, tasks to be tackled,                          interpersonal events, emergencies”.

Although Eraut is not necessarily talking about the learning organization in a dance environment, I can apply and relate his theories into a dance environment, and more importantly, my own environment. So what do I plan on doing? I plan on doing a little experiement and documenting the results. Classical ballet classes are very different to Contemporary Dance classes, and these are the two styles of dance I am most familiar with. I intend on taking a few open classes, one in classical ballet and the other in contemporary dance and using my journal, I want to document how the two environments differed from each other, adding how the teachers taught, how I learnt and picked up the exercises. I could also document how other people were learning during the class too. After taking these classes I want to compare them to how a dancer would learn in a company environment. I will feedback my results!  

How Professionals Learn Through Work - Professor Michael Eraut, SCEPTRE Research Consultant. http://surreyprofessionaltraining.pbworks.com/f/How+Professionals+Learn+through+Work.pdf

Recovering Informal Learning: Wisdom, Judgement and Community - Paul Hager & John  Halliday 

What style of learning works best for you?

After blogging about Benedict Carey's How We Learn book, I was interested in finding out briefly about different learning styles and which ones work for me. I found a diagram titled 'The Seven Styles of Learning' (Pictured below). 

Reading this I would definitely say I am a mixture of a few of these styles. Physical, Audio, Solitary and Visual.  As a dancer, kinaesthetic learning is a key important factor to me as I am continuously using, moving and exploring my body, activating my muscles as I learn. (Otherwise known as the hands-on learners). 




The Seven Styles of Learning: Which works for you? - Katie Lepie (November 2012) http://www.edudemic.com/styles-of-learning/

How We Learn - Benedict Carey

“From an early age, it is drilled into us: learning is all about self-discipline. We must confine ourselves to quiet study areas, turn off the music, and maintain a strict ritual if we want to ace that test, memorize that presentation or nail that piano recital. What if almost everything we were told about learning is wrong? And what if there was a way to achieve more with less effort?”

I came across Benedict Carey’s book, How We Learn, and am fascinated by his research. An American journalist and reporter on medical and science topics, Carey’s book introduces information that changes everything we thought we knew about the brain; including his honesty, experiences and strong narratives together with scientific research, wisdom and practical tips. He tells us to take a break and stop cramming information and beating our brain up. We need to study smarter, not harder.  In the introduction, Carey begins telling the reader about himself as a student, starting off with four simple words; I was a grind. ‘Like so many others, I grew up believing that learning was all self-discipline: a hard, lonely climb up the sheer rock face of knowledge to where the smart people lived. I was driven more by a fear of failing than by anything like curiosity or wonder’. He tells us how the only strategy he knew for deepening learning was to ‘drive yourself like a sled dog’. Carey’s real conversion experience occurred when he began applying for colleges, sending out application after application and failing to receive anything back but one spot on a waiting list, a college he dropped out of after attending for a year.

Reading sections of this book, I was reminded that there are so any ways in which people learn. Whether this be linguistic, kinaesthetic or mathematical learning. “Another common assumption is that the best way to master a particular skill is by devoting a block of time to repetitively practising just that. Wrong again. Studies find that the brain picks up patters more efficiently when presented with a mixed bag of related tasks than when it is force-fed just one, no matter the age of the student or the subject area”. Personally for me I find repetitive practise to be incredibly helpful, whereas others may not.

Learning does not need to be an isolated chore, but more a part of living. Each person has their own way of learning, there is never a ‘wrong’ way of learning as long as it works for the individual. Here are a few excerpts from How We Learn that I thought were interesting.

· The brain is not like a muscle, at least not in any straightforward sense. It is something else altogether, sensitive to mood, to timing, to circadian rhythms, as well as to location, environment. It registers far more than we’re conscious of and often adds previously unnoticed details when revisiting a memory or learned fact. “Moods colour everything we do, and when they’re extreme they can determine what we remember”.

· “If the brain is a learning machine, then it is an eccentric one. And it performs best when its quirks are exploited”.

· “In short, it is not that there is a right way and wrong way to learn. It’s that there are different strategies, each uniquely suited to capturing a particular type of information. A good hunter tailors the trap to the prey”. 

How We Learn; The Surprising Truth about When, Where and Why it Happens. Benedict Carey (Officially Published September 2014). 

How do you define a Learning Organization?

A learning organization is one that seeks to create its own future; that assumes learning is an ongoing and creative process for its members; and one that develops, adapts, and transforms itself in response to the needs and aspirations of people, both inside and outside itself (Navran Associates Newsletter 1993).

What is the first thing that pops into your head when you hear the words learning organization? For me, the words school, a company, development, planning and education come to mind straight away. As well as being interesting, the definition from the Navran Associates Newsletter highlights how the organization reaches success. It is characterised by a recognition where individual and collective learning are both key.

Many consultants have or are starting to recognize the significance of organizational learning. “We could argue that organizational learning is the ‘activity and the process by which organizations eventually reach the ideal of a learning organization’” (Finger and Brand 1999:136).

Peter Senge, writer and founder of the Society for Organizational Learning, introduces many aspects that could increase the organizational effectiveness and could also be personally developmental. “Learning organizations are organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together. (Senge 1990:3). For me, after reading this, the spectrum of what you could define to be a learning organization was expanded. The characteristics of a learning organization, (Or disciplines as Senge refers to them), is what encourages managers and employees by providing them tools to learn and work together and adapt to change. Peter Senge has written works that describe the 5 Disciplines that must be mastered when introducing learning into an organization.

1.  System Thinking – This provides a framework for you to see patterns of systemic activity. A pattern where there is a problem and people focus on a quick fix solution, rather than getting to the deeper source to the problem. This type of thinking focuses on looking beyond the immediate concerns and looking at the issue as a part of a whole system.     2.  Personal Mastery - There are three components essential for obtaining this mastery. First you must obtain personal vision, the picture of the future you desire. Secondly, you must use creative tension. Make reality reach your vision. And thirdly, you must have a commitment to truth. You must not deceive yourself no matter how comforting or convenient this self-deception may be.
3. Mental Models- These are simplified frameworks we use to understand the world that affects our behaviour, and this is what needs to be changed.
4. Building Shared Vision - Providing the answer to the question; 'What do we want to accomplish?' It's important to remember to think of a leaning organization as people working together at their best. A shared vision facilitates learning.
5. Team Learning - This happens when teams start to 'think together'. They share knowledge, experiences, ideas, and skills with each other and how to do them better. As a team you develop reflection, inquiry and discussion skills which can also apply to you individually. Conducting skilled conversations forms the basis of building a shared vision of change. 

The youtube link connects to Peter Senge himself talking about what makes a learning organization.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc2ruCErTok

To sum up the video, Senge basically defines a learning organization simply as the continual relentless process to keep learning together at our best. It is about becoming and staying disciplined, distinguishing fact from assumption. He also mentions the 3 things that always matter in practise, which are;

1. Do you have the tools?
2. Do you have guiding ideas that help people orient?
3. Do you have time? (As well as having a learning infrastructure – the resources to study and learn so you can help people learn from each other and bring people together).

He says, “You need tools, philosophy and Infrastructure to make it all real’. According to Senge there are only 2 mindsets that can infiltrate an organization; control or learning. ‘The question is, which one is dominate? If learning dominates you’ll create all the different aspects of what we call a learning organization”.

Finger, M. and Brand, S. B. (1999) ‘The concept of the “learning organization” applied to the transformation of the public sector’ in M. Easterby-Smith, L. Araujo and J. Burgoyne (eds.) Organizational Learning and the Learning Organization, London: Sage.

Senge, P. M. (1990) The Fifth Discipline. The art and practice of the learning organization, London: Random House

Further Research

After feeling a little lost with the module, I have found speaking to Paula incredibly helpful, and through that have made progress with further research! Still on the same path of finding what ‘The Perfect Learning Environment’ is, I have integrated themes that link important parts together. For example, I have found that some of the highlighted words in my previous mindmap; Chrysalis, change, diversity etc have a link between them that I could use to grow and more importantly evolve my research. I have almost ‘zoomed in’ on these words, adding a few others, finding interesting subjects, views and ideas that will help me to develop my lines of professional inquiry.

I have decided to leave interviewing my director and peers till later and focus on getting more analysis done. Rather than trying to be a perfectionist and planning every little thing down to a T, I want to see where my research takes me. What do I want to do? I want to develop some of the questions from my last blog by reading sources combined with using my own personal experience and observations to see where they take me into the next stage.