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