Drafts

This week I am thinking about the usefulness of completing the first draft of something. In some ways you need to think of writing the work you are handing–in  as an experience in itself that will teach you more. Having written it you might find that the experience of writing it completes the activity for you and helps you have a full perspective. At that point you will have a kind of clarity of completion that will in form the whole process and will mean you can go back to what you wrote and improve it in terms of order, or clarity of the points you make or seeing where you have left out something important.

I am not going back on what I am always saying about thinking. I am not saying that thinking is IN the writing but knowing the whole event is helpful for organising understanding of it. The whole event is doing the tasks AND writing about the learning. It is like the way if you are learning a dance sequence even if you don’t know how to do it all yet knowing how it will end helps you to start to internalise the sequence so you can learn and remember it. I always find while I am being taught a sequence it seems really long and overwhelming, but once I know the whole thing where it goes I can start to manage the parts of it much better and it doesn’t seem as long at all.

That is why at this point having a RoL written is in fact a way to inform the process of writing all of them. The experience of doing it, itself is a learning activity that should help clarify the whole task of making a portfolio of RoL.

What have you found?

Adesola

Week 7

Hopefully everything is going along well. You need time to let ideas 'stew', but try to have a 'template' RoL area done soon so that you can get feedback on it and them use it to inform how you write the rest of the areas of learning.

Also I have written a post on my BAPP site about analysis that might be interesting.
Weeks 6,7,8& 10 (Module three particularly)

Adesola

Citations

Here are some notes on citations. Module One might not call for many quotes but it is important to get used to using the academic format.

A quote should be on a separate line, in italics and indented. The quote also needs a ‘lead in’ and ‘lead out’ in your text. You cannot just put it there to make a point by itself.

Example:

“Dewey’s Pragmatist perspective further develops the research’s understanding of dance as language. Whereas above phenomenological hermeneutics implies dance could be thought of as dealing with the leftovers of verbal language Dewey reverses this idea:

‘language, signs and significance, come into existence not by intent and mind but by over-flow, by-product, in gestures and sounds. The story of language is the story of the use made of these occurrences; a use that is eventual as well as eventful.’  (Dewey 1958, p.175)

Dewey sees verbal language as an adornment to the act of communicating. He sees communication as the drive to share and collaborate meaning. Effort of doing this can lead to verbal language but communication is not brought into existence by verbal language and the effort of communication could just as well lead to a movement language . ” – Akinleye, unpublished thesis

The citation (Dewey, 1958, p.175) is linked to the following in the bibliography, which should not be separate, but a part of the same document. That means that when you read the above quote you can turn to the back pages and see which book it is. The citation tells us this: to find the book you go to the bibliography and look for the name Dewey. I may have a number of books by Dewey I have quoted from so then you look for the one published in 1958. Now you can locate the full detail example below. 

If there were two books by Dewey published in 1958 in my bibliography then I would put

(Dewey, 1958a p.175). Then the bibliography I would put 1958a again so you know which one of the two books by him published in 1958 I was talking about. So the bibliography entry will look like this:

Dewey, J. (1958) Experience and nature, New York: Dover Publications.

This citation format is Harvard:

Surname, initcal of first name. (Year the book you are looking at was published), where it was published: who published it

Note the punctuation as well as the content of the text. Using this method means your work is in line with standard citation formats, which means that anyone who is used to doing research can read your work and find the very text you have copied the quote from. Every book published in UK is in the British Library. That means that someone can find the book you are talking about. That is what citation is for. It is not to prove you know the quote was in a book by X.

Also note that the date is the date of the book you are holding in your hand when you look at the quote. So for instance Dewey did not first publish‘Experience and Nature’ in 1958, but that is the date of the book I have, so when I put the page number (…, p.175) you can find the page with the quote on it. In a book published earlier or later the print size maybe different or the size of the book pages etc… this means that that quote is not on page 175 of those books. This is why it is important the date is of the publication you have looked at, otherwise the page number is meaningless.

Does it make sense?

Adesola

RoL 'evidence'

Evidence: anything that establishes a fact or gives reason for believing something that’s what my trusty Oxford Minidictionary says. But that is a little ambiguous in terms of what is meant when you are asked to present ‘evidence’ along side your RoL.

Here are some ideas to consider: (I do not want to assume how you feel so I will write in first person here but in the hope you find resonance with the ideas described). As a dancer I tend to see the explanation for something in doing it. That is to explain a shovel I would pick it up and dig with it. (This is what I love about Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy because according to Dewey it is only a shovel when I pick it up and dig with it, if I use it to hold my door open than it is a ‘door holding opener’.  Things are what they do – Pragmatism. But this practical orientation is at the boundaries of traditional formal academic expectations.

The most established (expected) mode of explaining things is to write about them. It is to theorise about them. For instance to understand maths we do not have children go and build things we have them do sums. Then we might take that understanding and build something to show the theory works – as ‘evidence’ that it is ‘true’, but not to establish it is ‘true’. So my picking up the shovel and digging is seen as showing some theoretical idea about shovels is true NOT showing the shovel is ‘true’.  The practical becomes an illustration as it were of the theory.

This links to the idea of evidence in the RoL in the following way: the text that you write for your portfolio is the place where you establish understanding and meaning. You are being asked to theorises to certain extent about the practical knowledge you have from your work place. You showing you understand it by writing about it. The ‘evidence’ is only to illustrate what you write about – show it in action. So I would write about my work as a choreographer and skills I have developed. I would show I am aware of the skills I have by discussing what I feel is needed in order to be the MA level choreographer I feel I am. I could talk about pitfalls and how to avoid them. I would break down the skills showing I understand the complexity of the work. I might attach a programme of a piece I created for the Manchester International Festival. This ‘evidence’ would show that there is practical application of the choreography in the real world. It does not prove I know about Choreography (other than the implication that MIF would not hire someone who didn’t know what they were doing. That’s why I would chose the MIF programme over one from my local church hall) What it shows if that not only do I know what my skills are …look this is me applying them in the ‘real’ world. The programme illustrates I have done what I am talking about. But the meat and potatoes of showing I am a MA level choreographer is in the text of my RoL.

Does that make sense?

Now of course this is not to endorse the theory over the practical. My personal philosophy does not see a divide between them instead I see them as merely different ways to understand an embodied idea. But the academic world most does see a difference in some ways what you are saying is that you can talk the academic language  (AND do the actual thing out beyond the university walls!!!!).

Controversial? Political? It always is for me. BUT now where do you stand with this? In the wider context this is about understanding what you think about knowledge and then being able to (use that to) demonstrate where you have knowledge.  This is about pedagogy …. and practical knowing in dance!

That’s a lot to think about and I have included so much detail because I think this post would be useful later when you have done your RoL too in terms of positioning yourself in your research projects. BUT the short comment of this blog (and what is most relevant in Module One) is just make sure that you do not use the ‘evidence’ to explain the RoL. You have to do that in the text you write.

What do you think?

Adesola