Areas of Learning an Academic Reflection of My Dance Journey

Areas of Learning Brainstorming

As I further my studies through the Masters In Arts of Dance Pedagogy and Technique from Middlesex University, I must focus on my Professional Practice.  I work through mind maps and outlines that organizes my experience and this helps me visualize my Dance journey with clarity: from child student, to pre-professional training, to dancer, to teacher apprentice, to mature teacher and a member of my dance community.

I taught a class last night at Body Motion Dance School and I worked with my students through pointe work, and I saw myself in those beautiful students with their powerful legs seeking to defy gravity and their passionate eyes seeking a moment of freedom and beauty.  They grow and learn, and in their process I learn with them.  As they inquire further I find myself obligated to reorganize my knowledge so that it is deliverable and attainable so that it marks them beyond training, and becomes their own learning.  So that this new knowledge becomes cognitive attainment and they can embody their own dance learning.  As I teach them, I learn. I redefine what I know from years of sweat and study, I understand once again in a deeper place than before and for a brief moment my students experiential learning and my own match and meet in time and space.  

The road travelled has been long with many stops and great intellectual and physical complexity.  The greatest gift from this Masters Degree has been the tasks and ideas we are given to help us walk through our living dance biographies.  We are given books, handbooks, participate in meetings, and are given many ideas.  Reading, I came across a blog post from Dr. Adesola Akinleye from 2012. She suggested an exercise to help us identify our Areas of Learning through mapping an imaginary neighborhood in which our Dance Practice and experience is located.  This blog post of my own is my visualization of that imaginary neighborhood. I have started that exploration and have found that my Areas of Learning are defined by the dance role I was dominantely living at that moment: the dancer, the teacher, the choreographer and community outreach leader.  Here is where I discover the Areas of Learning that have governed my Dance practice, here is where I start.  I seek to understand my experiential learning, as our class handbook for prior learning states: “Practice is Knowledge”.  Let us discover that knowledge that has been stored in years of memories. Looking at Bloom´s Taxonomy Theory, the application of knowledge is already at a level higher than understanding.  Therefore, experential learning requires a higher cognitive acquirement than what we possibly understand prior to an organized reflective process.