MA Professional Practice Dance Technique Pedagogy

As my professional practice, is based around teaching and running my dance school, I choose this as the focus of my research project. When I set up my own dance school, I did it because I wanted to build a legacy and something that reflected my beliefs and values. I had taught in a variety of settings including salsa clubs, community groups, schools, fitness, private dance schools, primary and secondary schools and FE colleges. 10 years on, starting this MA course, I found myself questioning how my school was set up, the ethos I wanted to embrace and also how I filtered this into my teaching. On reflection, I noticed that prior experience had a lot to do with my beliefs and my priorities as the owner of a school as well as personality traits. For example, as a child I struggled socially in school to be part of a group as I felt my “difference” was not understood. As a result, when I set up my school I made a point of creating an environment in which “difference” was accepted and e

Something that resonated from our group discussion on Sunday was how our experiences as dancers filters through into our teaching. We agreed that to an extent the way we judge ourselves and critique as dancers, can add both a positive and negative aspect to our teaching and ultimately impact our students. If I consider my training and experience as a dancer, the areas of technique, which I struggled with are reinforced and over compensated in my teaching to ensure that the students I train do not have the same problems. The process of finding a topic for my research project was more difficult then I thought. Initially I thought about the impact of competitive dance on my students as this was something I introduced to my school 18 months ago and wanted to look at how this had changed the students attitudes, perceptions and others around them. The problem, was that indirectly, I already knew the answer, thus proving something I already knew or thought I knew. Instead I went back to