I have created a short survey to help with collecting further data for my inquiry - please feel free to take it if you have a spare moment! It is very quick and anonymous. Thank you!
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/5RZF6MB
Nafisah Baba
The Earth without Art is just Eh.
Wednesday 4 May 2016
Wednesday 13 April 2016
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!
Sunday 10 April 2016
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/
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.
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).
Tuesday 5 April 2016
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.
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.
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).
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.
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