The dancing narrative

 

There have been more themes emerging from my analysis, I don't think they are lots of different themes just underlying concepts from the emerging themes with a strong foundation. The first themes emerging were... 

Familiarity and Perception 

As I start to dig deeper into the data I have, I am starting to see the following themes emerging. 

Thought process, moments of understanding, the connection between mind and body. 

And at first, I panicked I thought I'm about half way through my analysis and I have lots of themes emerging and lots to think about, how ever will I hone down my ideas, so I can clearly analyse my experience in the experiment. However I realised the three above themes fall into the concept of familiarity and perception as they involve an intrinsic process which develops from inside out resulting in the way we move, feel and experience movement, and the process of this effects our aesthetic reproduction of movement, which means our process of learning movement and the way we facilitate experiencing movement is highly important for the outcome. It means we focus much more on the process and learning rather than what we want to experience at the end. 

I started to think about the way we learn as a transfer between mind and body, but in line with my inquiry I'm looking at whether cognitive awareness can be achieved through physical thinking in dance. In simple terms, is the way we setup learning exercises and deliver learning , make students more aware of the experiences they have and their own learning experiences. Because surely, it has to be more about the experience, feeling and personal understanding than regurgitating movement without any other reason than achieving the grade. As a teacher, we can become fixated on the examiner's perceptions of our students performance as I hate to say it and it shouldn't be like this but whatever students produce, unfortunately gives a pre perception of the teacher behind the learning. It is a marginalised approach, there is far more to taking an exam than the outcome. 

When I was analysing my experience learning a grade, I realised one thing was missing a room full of people in a similar experience to me. I then started to think would I have learned more from being surrounded by lots of others, different examples, different perceptions, a thriving environment where we learn from others, and ultimately this helps us learn about ourselves. We may have conversations about our learning, the movement which will influence the way we think and move, which we would be more aware of because discussion allows us to become more aware of our thinking. If we just do, without putting any thought, we just know the movement as it is, we don't become aware of the possibilities beyond changing, adapting our thought process behind it. If we continue to just dance it, from a physical thinking perspective we just learn the movement is the movement, we become familiar with what movements come next, and if we have little experience in remembering movements, our focus just becomes remembering the movement not explore the possibilities beyond that.

Now as I'm writing this, I'm thinking but instinctively and inherently I would always be physically thinking, I would continue to learn beyond what the movement is, trying to find meaning and associate what I felt with what I understand, it comes naturally because I have been trained to do it, BUT... with students, especially those who have no experience in taking dance examinations and learning syllabi, it won't be inherent nature because they are a novice at this point. 

I picked up on an interesting point Stella made about our experiences building on the whiteboard, because at the end of every experience we don't wipe the whiteboard clean. I think this is so true, our experiences are linked.

Thinking about our experiences when learning movement, a underlying theme under Perception is moments of understanding. When do our perceptions become a moment of understanding and what is most interesting when does this result in physical thinking for us to become cognitively aware of what we have experienced. So much like the narrative I have to critically think about what all these things mean before I choose the selected evidence and most supportive themes for analysis linking back to my hypothesis. I like to think about this process as a story, although won't be written as one, it will appear as a piece of narrative, which then we will delve into for understanding. 

Reading the literature around moments of understanding, a great piece of literature which explores moments of pause, helped me to understand a story and how it can explore the meaning behind our perceptions and ideas. "story can expand, advance/ and/or shift perspectives, particularly around those whose experiences have been marginalised and or silenced. As familiarity with aspects of a story increases, so too does the likelihood of readers being transported into the narrative world" (Ginsberg and Glenn, 2019). 

I like to compare the narrative to our experience of learning. The front cover is the syllabus but the story is our thought process and practical understanding, with our happily ever after the end product, and the second series the questions that arose. Now thinking back to each time I experienced a exercise, it was a new chapter, but there was a link because when I watched the footage, as I became more familiar with the style and movement requirements the way I learned, and moved changed. Not only did the change happen in the reflective diaries but my movement. But it still didn't feel authentic to me, so something is missing, and I am hoping to find this when I start to analyse the rest of my footage, maybe this will become clearer to me. 

Ginsberg, R. and Glenn, W. (2019) Moments of Pause: Understanding students shifting perceptions during a Muslim Young Adult learning experience. International Literacy Foundation. 55(4). Available at: https://ila-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.mdx.ac.uk/doi/epdf/10.1002/rrq.285.