How I wish I had come across this article when first joining UAL. The arts school approach isn’t always a given, particularly as my initial training as a dancer was conservatoire, and my previous experience in HE was somewhere between conservatoire and drama school/uni. “Signature `Pedagogies” were helpful and ‘very UAL’. As I read this, I was also continually asking: how does this relate to performance practices (in contrast to design), and, how does this relate to movement practise?
My Take away thoughts are:
The crit; Critical and evaluative tool: akin to peer & tutor feedback. Interesting notion of “defending’ work. I’m still pondering that.
The studio; loads of thoughts here. “How to avoid cruising through and dispensing wisdom”…. Sooooo on point, but on the flip side, this can happen when you have 20+ students and you have to float around seeing snippets of group work and feeding back in the moment when you see the students 3hours a week. Students create a social learning environment…. What do we mean by social? -A chit chat or a place where social differences can be shared and used creatively within the work… my students rarely create solo work, so this sharing is important. Individual studio space, made me chuckle. This isn’t the context for acting and performance, fighting for 3 metres squared per group is more relevant. How to create a sense of studio when not onsite. VERY IMPORTANT. We need to be able to rehearse in non conventional spaces, this for me is discipline.
Pedagogies of Ambiguity. Love this. Trust the process and all. Learning to manage working through ambiguity: process of discovery and creation. This is one of the biggest struggles for students, who want to achieve the end piece without having to bare the difficulties of the unknown, which often leads them to use the first proposal given, rather than really going through research and development.
The brief. Project based learning, emphasis on project. Again, so important within the context of UAL.
The live Project. Not sure how this is different from the brief in live performance??
Development of work. Encouraging students to document their work, i.e., what happens in the live moment,: how can this process be documented.
Research. Yep
Dialogic exchange. Role of language in the learning process. Interesting point. Relate to non verbal language (i.e. the body) also.
Materiality: What if the production is the body itself. Material used is the body and not outside of it. The body as a living thing, soma etc etc. Embodied learning, and embodied practise. Important to note the difference. …. This is an essay in and of itself. (Embodied learning: for me – the how, and the why someone moves (as in movement).)
Object based learning. Object is the centre of the learning: play/charact er/dramaturgy etc etc
Teaching Strategies: arts school language useful: paralleling: practise and teaching. Dovetailing: Teaching and practise merge.
Real life Problematic, Professionalism. Important reflection on attempting to merge the boundaries between real world and academic setting.
Whats missing for me in this article is attention to peer learning and peer feedback or peer evaluations. This is a crucial part of pedagogy for ensemble (collaborative) making. Teaching groups of 20+ who need to negotiate space, time, and devising together.