The transition from dancer to teacher was a significant change in my life. After suffering reoccurring injuries I had to come to understand that physically and emotionally I would not be able to continue dancing. I think as this transition happened earlier in my career than planned I wanted to look into support for injured dancers in training.
A few weeks back I wrote question ideas for both the interviews and questionnaires I would carry out. I sent these to my tutor and also posted some of them on my SIG. From feedback I realised that my questions would not inform my work as a teacher and therefore my inquiry research would not be relevant to my current practice.
I included a lot of medical and psychology influenced questions which is an area that I am not qualified in and would therefore not give me the authority to draw conclusive or informed opinions on. I also included questions ABOUT the injury rather then EFFECTS OF, and my questionnaire appeared more as a monitoring form rather than looking into how injury actually affects students in vocational training. Ultimately my data would be near useless to my inquiry!
My tutor, Paula commented:
"Your inquiry is about improving your teaching role and adding to your knowledge about how your students think about injury? Will the questions you ask in the questionnaire lead to you being able to improve your teaching performance ? How? It is not about monitoring injury for the dance school – it is about your being more informed?"
I can see now that I was not looking at how the information linked back to my learning – to my role as a teacher in the school, THE CONTEXT!
I must remember that the purpose of my inquiry is to inform my practice as teacher and that this part in the BAPP programme will give me the knowledge of how to carry out an inquiry further down the line in my career. I want to improve my teaching, expand my knowledge, and in turn the experience for my students. This is my context and why I want to look into how TEACHERS can support their injured dance students.
Thanks for this Rebecca - doing one of these inquiries does take focus but also the ability to work with the context - it is in effect a 'live' project a real project - that might influence change within your practice and your workplace - so reflection in action (Schon) definitely a feature of this work - very tricky with practitioner research! Bw
ReplyDeleteYes absolutely! I feel that I often reflect on what has or is happening in my practice as both Teacher and Student and so it was easy to loose sight of the context. I wanted to directly help the students so thought I needed to aim my research and possible artefact at them specifically. Eventually I understood that by aiming my inquiry towards teaching and what more can be done for students I am still helping/benefitting my students from my research however my artefact will be aimed at teachers- what more they can do to improve support for injured dancers in training and therefore improving my own professional practice. As I wrote in my previous blogs when reading about Schon and reflective theories, as dancers we often have to reflect in action. This is certainly how I work. I have to act, possibly make a mistake, but from that I am able to learn and discover what went wrong, what didn't work, and change it the next time.
ReplyDelete