Upon embarking on the BAPP arts course I have found that for years I have unknowingly used different aspects of reflective practice within my personal and professional life. Essentially reflecting back upon your mistakes and triumphs is part of growing up, you can become more experienced in reflection as you gain more knowledge of other peoples perspectives. Children cognitively are not mature enough to see the world with as much of an open mind as adults, so therefore we must soak in the information we have and learn from it. On numerous occasions I have looked back on a past event and thought about how I could have changed the outcome, most recently I was organising an event for a very close friend of mine, most aspects of the event went really well but looking back I realised how much pressure I put on myself and how I could have asked for other peoples help. As a person I am very determined to pursue activities on my own, rarely asking for help, however I am learning to change my ways and this course is helping me to do that.
In David Boud's 'Using Journal writing to enhance reflective practice' he talks about how keeping a journal can be 'a means of puzzling through what is happening in our work and private lives', I completely agree with him on this, as since starting my own journal I have discovered so much about myself. I wasn't aware of how easily I pick up sequences compared to some of the people on my team until I looked back on my day and wrote about it all. I also found that writing about how I was feeling ensured that I didnt take my emotions out on my colleagues. I really enjoy re-evaluating my journal and discovered new thoughts about how I could have intervened in certain situations. I feel its important that Boud emphasizes how we need to attend to our feelings 'Anything negative can distort other perceptions and block understanding... Positive experiences can be celebrated, they enhance the desire to pursue learning.' Expressing your feelings onto a page helps you to be more open minded to other peoples actions in an event, being negative about a situation makes it really hard to see things from anothers point of view. Its important to remember that a journal is not just about writing but can include images, sketches, poems and use of color and form, these are all ways to deepen reflection and have a clearer sense of an event and how it made you feel.
Reflective practice is not just about looking back on past events, its about how your reflection can help you learn, its a tool for enhancing your ability to learn from experience. This tool is most widely used within professions that experience a process of change for example choreographers in a process of creating new pieces, doctors/nurses in the process of healing, teachers in the process of education. John Dewey believed there were different levels of experience. For example if you had a low quality of education in a particular subject then you would not engage well within that class and therefore be unable to learn as much, however if the level of education was good then you would have a better experience and engage more in that class enabling you to learn more. He was also felt that interaction with the Arts led to a unique and valuable experience (Dewey, 1934). Dewey also felt that this engagement with experience helped to develop social skills and enabled people to work better in society. Kurt Lewin was also interested in social change and developed the idea of 'spiral steps' where you would divide an experience into separate sections e.g.
- Action: Manager off sick
- evaluation: very frustrating, loads of work to do and no one to help manage the situation, feel let down.
- planning Assign someone to take the lead on things, calm self down, disperse negative thoughts as they will not help situation.
- action: everyone working together to get job done.
David Kolb also developed the idea of a cycle; the learning cycle. At which point do we enter the learning cycle and what kind of learner are you?
I always thought that I learnt from reflective observation, I would have to see a movement performed before I could begin to work it out for myself. It doesn't matter what type of learner you are, its more about knowing at what point do you begin to learn. The Kolb four stage learning cycle is a process where ideally the learner has immediate/concrete experiences which can then lead to observations and reflections, these reflections are then absorbed and translated into abstract concepts with implications for action, the learner can then experiment with these reflections and create a new experience. Therefore Kolbs model works on two different levels:
- Concrete experience (CE)
- Reflective observation (RO)
- Abstract conceptualization (AC)
- Active Experiment (AE)
After reading about Kolbs learning cycle, I feel that I enter the learning cycle as a Reflective observer however I then move into abstract conceptualization before actively trying it out myself. This I have found is my way of learning new dance sequences. However before learning lines I usually like to watch a clip of what I am about to learn (RO), try it out straight away (AE) and then use repetition to get the lines in my head, I completely bypass Abstract Conceptualization and Concrete experience when I have got lines to learn.
Our learning style is a product of two decisions:
- How we decide to embark on a task i.e. Jumping straight in and grasping the experience or deciding that our preference is to watch the task being done.
- Secondly is our emotional response to the experience do we prefer to think or feel?
We either opt for 1a) watching others experiencing the task and reflecting on what occurs (RO) or 1b) jumping straight in and just doing it (AE). It really is very difficult to decide what you do as I find many aspects of these learning styles are a part of me. At the same time we choose how we feel about the experience and how to turn it into something meanigful 2a) through gaining new information by analyzing (AC) or 2b) having concrete evidence that you have already experienced (CE).
In terms of setting up my blog I intially took a look at some other peoples blogs and took notes about how they had began forming theirs (RO), once I felt like I had an idea of what I wanted to doI began trying out different ideas (AE). Although my learning styles differ depending on what I am doing the point at which I enter my learning always seems to be the style of reflective observation. It is important for me to know this as when I am discovering and learning new things there may not be someone or something that I can watch so therefore I would need to find a new way into the learning cycle.
VAK was developed by Howard Gardner, its a theory that was used at my secondary school when I was starting my GCSE's, we each had to take the learning styles test to determine the most effective way for us to revise/learn. I remember my test saying I was partially a kinaesthetic learner and partially a visual learner. I was told that as a kinaesthetic learner I needed to practice what I was learning (repetition) and also being a visual learner I would find subjects that involved a lot of imagery and colour would help me to absorb the information. Although Gardner developed these learning styles he very much believed that they should not limit people to thinking they can only learn one way, for me although I was told I was more of a kinaesthetic learner, I also absorbed information visually. I feel that when I am learning songs for a new show it is imperative for me to learn by listening to the song over and over and over again which ofcorse is more of an auditory learning style. These learning styles help you to understand not only how you learn but how others learn so if there is a pupil who is not picking up the steps to a sequence by going over and over them then maybe pulling them out to watch might help them as they could be a visual learner.
Another model was also created by Peter Honey and Alan Mumford (Honey and Mumford 1992). Their model is inspired by Kolb and also has four stages:
- Having an experience
- Reviewing the experience
- Concluding from the experience
- Planning the next steps
I think this model is really use when expressing yourself in a journal, as it gives you clear steps to help deepen reflective thought based on your own written experiences. I applied these steps to my own journal and managed to create a list of ways to be more productive with my day/week, I now set myself targets to reach each day as I found a pattern in my journal where I was constantly saying 'I need to be more flexible/sharper/on it/involved with my team' and thought now is the time to change this. If it wasnt for starting my journal I doubt I would have realised that I was having these thoughts so regularly.
Donald Schon (1987) came up with the idea that reflection not only occurs when thinking about past events but can occur in the midst of action. Reflection -in-action happens when you respond to whats happening as it happens, for example: I was back stage with two colleagues before the start of our show rock tower, the overture music was playing and one of my colleagues discovered her microphone had been muted and none of us knew how to un mute it, she was also the first person to sing so I swapped her microphone for mine as I didnt sing on my own til the next number, as I went on stage I crossed over to where one of the technical staff were and handed him the microphone miming what had happened (as I was on stage at the time), he sorted the problem and managed to hand it back to me and in the black out of the next number I switched back. Each microphone is set to the person that has it for example I have quite a bit of reverb on mine as I like how it sounds, therefore it was important that we all had our own microphones. Schon believed that reflection-on-action is adopted by academics who look back on a situation and learn from it that way.
In Reader 2 it tells us that Robert Kottcamp believes that reflection -in-action is harder to achieve (he likens reflection -in-action to 'on-line' and reflection -on- action as 'offline')
'The distinction ... between future and present acknowledges Schon's (1983) important differentiation between reflection -on-action (reflection on past event) and reflection-in-action (reflection in the midst of an ongoing action). The latter type is the more difficult to achieve, but the more powerful for improvement of practice because it results in "on-line" experiments to adjust and improve one's professional actions. It is more difficult to achieve because the actor must simultaneously attend to performing the action and observe and analyse his or her action, as if from external perspective. Further, in reflection-in-action the sole collector of data on the event.
Reflection-on-action is accomplished "off-line" at a time when full attention ca be give to analysis and planning for the future without the imperative for immediate action ... (Kottcamp,1990)"
Personally I understand where Kottcamp is coming from and to a certain degree different professions do require different skills (as a performer you are used to acting in the moment whereas an academic does not use this skill as often). However I don't believe that it entirely impacts the way you reflect. As a dancer I do reflect in the moment but I also enjoy reflecting back on past events.
Kottcamp had the idea that "dancers learn kinaesthetically" even though he was not a dancer himself. This got me thinking, what ideas do I like? It's really difficult to think of ideas and why I have them. I'm going to start listing my ideas and peeling back the layers to discover why I've thought in such a way.
Tacit knowledge is knowledge which cannot be expressed with words. It is important that we find ways to access tacit knowledge as it is a huge part of being in the arts. In her book 'the creative habit' (Tharp and Reiter 2006) discusses different reflective practices that she has developed. for example muscle memory "her memory of movement doesnt need to be accessed through conscious effort" (Tharp and Reiter 2006). I have experienced the wonders of muscle memory through out my current job. After weeks of rehearsals and not recapping numbers we were all thrust onto the stage and at times when I really didnt think I knew a routine some how I just did it, it really is the strangest thing, trusting your body rather than your mind.
The tasks in reader 2 have taught me so much about myself, I keep a journal that looks like a book of lists and scribbles but to me its a reflection of my week, I am able to learn new things about my personality and the way I work everyday. I really believe now that I learn through reflective observation and thats helped me to pick up new things at work as well as in my personal life.
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