Staring back Skypes

This weekend we had our first Skype sessions back: Friday and Saturday. Skype sessions are an opportunity to discuss with other members of the MAPP Learning Community.

Shinny and new:  The MAPP course has just been revalidated. We have three routes now MAPP DTP, MAPP Dance and MAPP Somatic Studies. There is a new MAPP UniHub page (for those who are in Module Two and Three you will be ‘migrated’ over), read the most recent Handbooks. So this skype we had a mixed family group of MAPP DTP and MAPP Dance people.

What’s-what

-       Got questions about the course, dates, directions, word-counts etc… go to the Handbooks and UniHub folders

-       Got ideas to share, explore, practice writing, reflect…go to the blogs and post and comment on others

-       Practice talking about your work, your practice, what you are learning and doing …go to a Skype discussion.

-       Up-dates and current thinking across the MAPP learning community check Advisor’s blogs.

What are one to ones with Advisors for? These are to discuss feedback, ideas and developments in your work. So, having a one-to-one at the start of term before you get any feedback seems like you actually need Handbooks and UniHub. Likewise getting feedback and thinking about it but not communicating with your Advisor in Week 9 sounds like you should book a one-to-one!!

In the discussion groups, we talked about different aspects of starting, starting back, study, emotions. Here is an overview of some of the things that were talked about people attending are posting on the different points so have a look at what they say.

Notes from discussions:

• It is good to hear other people’s feelings and realise I am not alone…
• Time management is key – creating your own framework of deadlines is important. The Modules do not do this for you because they are designed for people with very different schedules and as professionals it is assume you are better at organising yourself and your work than someone else imposing on you would be!
• The blogs have been very useful for keeping in touch – thinking of ways to keep them active and being active on them is important.
• Work load balance…
• Use resources – engage with the handbooks (read them more than once and keep notes), on-line library, each other your practice…
• Be brave and share ideas - as professionals we are used to having to be ‘right’ all the time and not knowing seems scary
• Have courage to learning something new – if nothing new seems to be manifesting it is not because it is not there – it is more likely you need to be more open and brave about not knowing. Not knowing is the vacuum that knowledge will fill. If there is no vacuum then it is hard to fit more into what is already organises and fits together. If you don’t know something the response does not have to be to get angry or assume it is because someone has been remiss in telling you what to do.
• Recognise and own emotions: enthusiasm lifts the group – your confidence not to be down on yourself actually helps those around you. It is not their job to convince you, you are ok.
• Time management again!!
• Organise your equipment – book mark blogs, keep a pocket notebook etc…
• As professionals it might be the fear of starting into something you have less experience of, rather than the actual work that you feel strongest now. Now is the time to shelve that and just get on with things as best you can, knowing you are in a learning community and not alone and that you have a personal history of success that brought you to this moment.
• Think about how you want to contribute to the learning community.

Keep blog post to 400 words max so people have time to read and reply. Therefore, I am going to stop here…

Have a look at what people on the discussion said. If you were in the discussion and your blog address isn’t here or you are still making it please add it to the comments so people can click on it and visit you.

When you visit a blog post leave a comment even if it is just a word. But try to make it a critical reflective productive comment! Please note in the recently validated MAPP we have now put more emphasis on engaging with the blogs. Contribution to discussion and community is considered a post-Graduate skill. 

http://helenkindred.blogspot.co.uk

https://katherine-lucy.blogspot.co.uk

http://kensdancer.blogspot.co.uk

https://jvsyd.blogspot.co.uk

http://lisadentdancer.blogspot.co.uk

http://creativeacademydance.blogspot.co.uk

http://sunitabolton.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/

https://garrywclarke.blogspot.co.uk

http://marianikoldance.blogspot.co.uk

Also use the word tags at the side of my blog to look at other posts I have done about starting back.

Comments...

Adesola

February 12th chats

Sundays chats.

A lot of both chats were about ‘truth’ and answers. We talked about how ‘learning’ has slowly slipped into ‘information gathering’. The student is given information and then at the test you re-tell the information. So as a student your job becomes gathering the correct information in order to re-tell the correct things to get the grade to pass the course – like a little treasure hunt. But what then?

This course is not about that. It is about critical thinking and reflection. So there are no answers just better and better questions. It is not to be annoying it is because we are coming from a humanities background – dance - where truth is perceived or felt. It is not fixed.  We literally can not tell you an answer because there isn’t one. There is every answer, and no answer.

So we were thinking about how one avoids repeatedly falling into the rut of looking for someone to tell us what to do, and most importantly not feeling lost when there doesn’t seem to be someone to tell you. Also about how the loudest ‘voice’ is not the voice of authority. It is, after all, not what is being said but how you are hearing it that gives things meaning.  

We talked about how reflective practices support education. Also about developing dialogues particularly the importance of developing conversations across the MAPP community not in order to come to a consensus of what you have to say to pass but to tap into the ideas and knowledge that is held across all the experiences colleagues on or running the course have between them.

We talked about the ethics of 1^st person ‘v’ 3^rd person writing. How 3^rd person implies a kind of Grand Narrative or truth that everyone shares. How 1^st person lays bare the idea that you are talking about perceptions and experiences. Then some people commented that in the past they have been criticised for being opinionated. But a writer can be opinionated whether they are writing in 1^st or 3^rd person. It is their opinion after all. The problem is not that you have an opinion it is only have a concept of one opinion and only writing from that one opinion in 1^st or 3^rd person. The antidote to being opinionated is being reflective we decided.  

Here are summaries people said made into a poem:

A little Breath

Self-study and finding your way.

Writing a blog post every other day.

Reflective practices: different approaches to be

A student, a teacher, a part of the dance community.

Don’t have to be told what to do.

Sharing experiences that are part of you.

New ideas, new perspectives on for the ‘truths’ in what you explore.

An approach to learning without anticipating what is behind each door.

Have a look at what other people in the conversations said.

http://brandonleesears.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/mapp-dtp-beginnings.html?m=1

http://helenkindred.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/a-little-bit-of-breath.html

https://barbarabesque.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/different-approaches.html

https://dixieogivar.blogspot.no/2017/02/hello-everybody-after-skype-meeting.html#comment-form

http://ruthellend.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/following-our-early-evening-skype.html

http://rebeccajones87.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/how-to-move-on-to-next-module-what.html#comment-form

https://parimalamapp.blogspot.com/2017/02/12022017-back-in-action-module-two.html

Please leave comments here and with each other 

Adesola

Thoughts on Module Three in week three:

Consent forms: Make sure your consent form has been approved by your advisor (Helen or me). If you had changes suggested to you for your consent form as part of the feedback from Module Two make sure you have made the changes. It is important the consent form makes it clear how people can contact your advisor if they had questions or comments they want to ask about the project.

Planning: Also a point that is often mentioned in feedback for Module Two is your timetable for your inquiry (the Gant chart). Now you might see why this is so important to keep you on a good track. At this point (Week 3) you might either feel like you have found it hard to get things off the ground, hard to get interviews or trips you have planned confirmed or maybe the opposite you feel like there is so much data you are collecting and you still have so much to go. Either way you can see how time runs away with you. If you think about it, we have completed 1/4 of the term already. Having your timetable, that you planned to follow regardless of the crazy of getting into the inquiry is really useful. I strongly recommend that you see the module in three equal parts

1) data collection (including literature and reflection),

2) analysis (literature and reflection also continues),

3) communicating what you have learnt – writing-up the inquiry reflective report and the artefact and getting feedback on your draft. 

So that is about four weeks for each thing. Remember collecting data is just getting the stuff together you are going to think about, it is not the whole inquiry. The meat (tofu) and potatoes is the analysis – what you do with the data – how you make it meaningful.

Capturing process: Just like in Module One (and Two), you are on the journey of a module and you need to capture your process in order to reflect on it at the end of the module. It is very easy in Module Three to stop posting blogs, not talk on linked-in, and not use your reflective diary as much. But you need to capture moments of the process just as much as you need to in the the other Modules. The inquiry is about the journey you take when you decide to find out more about the area/question/ idea that is your inquiry topic. It is not about you coming up with a definitive answer to something at the end. The process of finding out is inquiry. The inquiry is ‘when you go down the rabbit hole of your question what happens?’ You need to capture moments in the journey to refer to later and to share with other for feedback and comment and a new perspective.

Lastly thinking about starting itself. In a ‘good’ inquiry there are lots of starts...! Firstly when you got your feedback from Module Two your response to the feedback was not “work done before you start the inquiry”, it was the start of the inquiry- It was the beginning of you thinking more about the question/area of the inquiry. Similarly, if you started doing something and realized you needed to change something, that is not ‘starting over’ it is also part of the process of understanding better, of knowing more about the question and knowing more about how to go about looking into it. All the ‘force starts’, ‘mistakes’, ‘changes’ that you come across are part of you opening your ideas and knowing more about the field so they are the inquiry. This is why capturing your process is so important each bend in the road is a part of how you are coming to know more about this topic and you need to make sure you notice the changes in yourself and capture that moment before you move on. Otherwise, just like a physical journey, when you look back at what you have done you will only be able to see as far as the last bend in the road, but you know the whole journey was much longer than that.

Remember it is not about ‘discovering’ a solution to a problem – the inquiry is about you finding out more and in order to do so things are going to change. Think about different ways of capturing the moments of your inquiry. Your blogs, reflections etc.. do not all have to be words. The way you capture an idea reflects your relationship with the idea itself (remember that for when we talk about/think about the Professional Artefact).   

OK keep going…
Please comment...

Adesola