Author Archives: dogpossum

I’m stupid busy today, so I don’t have time to round up all my thoughts properly. That means that this post will be typically chaotic, full of spurious assertions and otherwise mo with the dodge.

But I want to keep a note of my responses to robcorr’s latest post about homework, which has an interesting bit at the end:

Homework setting and practice will have to change so that students are learning about self-management and self-regulation. The sort of homework tasks that promote learning these skills will not focus on drill and practice but require homework tasks where students make some decisions and choices and also exercise some autonomy.

This immediately makes me think about how we practice dance on our own. I’m interested in the idea that effective learning involves dance in a range of spaces – classes, practicing at home, social dancing, dancing like a fool in the lounge room, going to night clubs, dancing to live bands, etc etc etc. This idea of dance in everyday spaces is something I’ve borrowed from research into vernacular dance (particularly by Tommy DeFrantz, LeeEllen Friedland and Katrina Hazzard Gordon), where dance is just one part of a whole system of creative and everyday labour/practice, and that this everydayness (vernacularness) is what makes it robust and vibrant. It also makes it flexible, mutable and inconstant rather than fixed, constant and predictable. Which of course is what I love about it. Looking at how dance happens in our own different everyday spaces – different contexts – allow us to think more actively about what we are doing, to break ‘habits’, and to make our movements active choices. This hopefully helps us to become more creative, more responsive dancers. If you give a shit about that sort of thing. Me, I want to learn all the things, so I want all the skills.

LEARN ALL THE THINGS

Relatedly, I’ve been thinking about the classes we run for more experienced dancers not as ‘lessons’, but as spaces which we organise (because we have the time and inclination, not because we are the ‘best’) and which we all participate in for learning funz. And then we go to other people’s classes because we want to experience classes as a participant rather than organiser. We also all go (both class coordinators and participants) to work on material together in an informal space (ie a shared practice time), where the assumption is that we all have the same status, though with different needs and interests. This destabilises the hierarchy that otherwise dominates formal learning spaces. Hopefully.

I want to note, here, that a little hiearchy can be a very useful thing. When a group of people come together to do a complex task, they can organise themselves in lots of different ways. If it’s a time-sensitive task, then leadership (or hierarchy) can be very useful. So I’m not a complete anarchist – I think that structure and hierarchy can be useful.

But I don’t think that hiearchies of power and status should be fixed and constant across all social and cultural spaces. For example, just because you’re a high profile dance teacher, doesn’t mean your opinions about agriculture are more important, or that we should just smile when you say offensive things or sexually harass people.

I do think that, as sensible hoomans, we can agree to follow the leadership of someone in a particular moment in time. I quite like being directed or led by someone else, and I really like the idea of being part of a group that agrees to be directed by someone’s vision or idea. Just to see what happens, or how it turns out. It can be really super fun to be a cog in a greater machine, making something large and wonderful. But when that task is done, doesn’t mean we then continue to do as we’re told, or to cede our decision-making or opinions to those of that leader.

So status – power – can be mutable, changing and passed around. It can be a matter of consensus. The best sorts of communities or social groups are those where members feel confident enough in the group to allow other people to assume leadership roles, to take them on themselves, and to trust other participants not to exploit this power when it comes to them. This sort of community can be very scary for peeps who like nice, constant structures and relationships of power. And an awful lot of lindy hoppers today really like those clearly mapped out, constant systems.

Finally, Rebecca has a few posts about practicing dance including one with a blueprint for structuring practice sessions, which are quite interesting. I think I disagree with almost everything she says in the post Should you be practicing lindy hop more?, mostly because the tone structures the post (and discussion) in a very inflexible way. But also because I don’t think there are just three types of lindy hoppers (regarding opinions about practice), nor do I think these three types are static – we often move through phases depending on lifestyle, interests and, well, life. I’m certain Rebecca realises this (because she is clever), but the blog’s style doesn’t allow for this round-about sort of thinking.
Dance World Takeover often has very prescriptive ‘solutions’ for problems. This is a brilliant approach for a blog that wants lots of readers, and a wide readership. Shorter posts, clearer, more prescriptive language, clear goals and results. Which dovetails quite nicely with a conventional dance class ideology, and with broader cultures of learning and pedagogy in lindy hop. Me, I’m way more hippy like in that I prefer to think and talk through things in a way that yields multiple, self-guided ‘progressions’ rather than ‘fixes’. In other words, more talk, fewer concrete results.
But Rebecca makes an excellent point in emphasising the fact that the structure of a practice session yields particular results and encourages particular behaviours. A formally structured practice session encourages different types of learning than a flexible session with an emphasis on play and self-guided discovery. I think that both approaches are equally important. In fact, as I’ve said above, I think that participating in a range of dance spaces and activities is very good for us – it encourages flexible, reflexive learning. Also with the fun for our brains.

So what has all this to do with homework? Homework is self-guided learning, stuff that you do outside the formal class room. That excerpt above suggests that it works best with older students, but only when structured in effective ways. I’d suppose that this has something to do with developmental processes in children, but also to do with the way school institutionalise children, and trains them to behave in certain ways when self-regulating. But though I’m familiar with the basic arguments in the pro/anti- homework debates, I don’t actually properly know anything about them.

My hippy feminist socialist self suspects that a mutable ‘homework’ practice – for dancing as well as school work – which responds to the needs and interest of the student is most powerful. And here, of course, I think about the montessori and other free schooling models which encourage self-guided study, and which gave us some of the most talented, most creative American lindy hoppers in the world today.

Note: this is, once again, just one of a series of posts on a topic that’s boiling away in the back of my brain. It’s provoked by the everyday stuff in my life (ie teaching and learning and dancing), but in this instance it’s sadly under-researched.
I’m currently teaching weekly classes in solo dance and lindy hop, and have been for about nine months since I first returned to teaching after a ten year break. I spent about ten years (those same ten years :D ) teaching undergraduates in various universities. Teaching dance is almost entirely unlike teaching undergraduates about cultural studies.
I’ve also organised two workshop weekends here in Sydney this year. One covered lindy hop, blues and solo dance, the other covering just solo dance. Both incorporated a teacher-training session. The goal of these teacher training sessions was not to ‘teach teachers to be better teachers’, but to provide a structured session with visiting teachers where local teachers can talk about and experiment with ideas for teaching dance.

I’m just new to teaching dance and organising dance workshops. So I’m trying to make a lot of mistakes so I can learn from them, and I want to understand current practices before I go making radical changes. And because this is dance teaching, I’m not working alone: the best thing about lindy hop is that we’re goddamn collaborative learners. We really, really like doing projects with other peeps. Yay.

I don’t really know much about teaching (dance or university), and I’ve only read sparingly. I need to get more with the learning. I have to say, though, that teaching dance is just about the most interesting thing I’ve ever done in dance. Now, if only it actually paid well…

Here’re some recent posts tracking my thinking about teaching dance to make you angry with their limitations:

• teaching challenges: routines, structure and improvisation in class
• Teaching challenges 2: drilling and memorising
• Valuing the process rather than the product

Note: this posts contradicts itself quite a bit.
That’s because this is just a series of thoughts. I should learn to edit posts, eh?

Here are three things that’ve been rolling about in my head this week.

1. A friend told me a story about Skye Humphries. Someone in a class at Herrang asked him how he got so good at solo dance. And he said “I practice every day.”

2. I read this npr story Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning.

3. There’s quite a bit of criticism of Ken Burns’ Jazz series’ presentation of jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as isolated, musical genius rather than as parts of living, working communities of creative development.

All of these things tie into my current obsession: teaching through practice and experimentation, rather than teaching through drilling with the aim of perfect reproduction. And more implicitly, my (eternal) obsession with the fact that tying ourselves to conventional, hierarchical, institutional pedagogic practice is less useful than encouraging more fluid, mutable cultures and communities of cultural and creative practice. Basically, I think that better dancing comes from better ways of thinking about teaching and learning dance.

I’ve noticed that gifted dancers – the ones who get it first time, and really quickly – tend to struggle with teaching. They find it difficult to conceptualise, let alone articulate, what they do when they move their body. They just find learning new dance steps so easy they aren’t aware of the composite elements of the step as a whole. This is related in a way to students over-achieving academically. They’re so used to getting things right, they don’t really know how to deal with getting things wrong. And they’re so used to just doing things properly the first time, they don’t know how to learn.

The most successful artists are more often those who have to work hard on their art – their craft – to learn, and who are more willing to spend time learning and experimenting and challenging their own ideas. Skye certainly has ‘natural talent’ but he ‘got that good’ by working really hard, every day. Louis Armstrong was a musical genius, but he was part of a living, breathing community of musicians and dancers and club owners and talent managers and bands. If his wife Lil Armstrong hadn’t pushed him to leave King Oliver’s band, if hadn’t left his safe, familiar community, he’d probably never have pushed himself to those heights of achievement. And as Lipsitz points out (and I discuss in Lists and Canons in Jazz) and the trouble with linear jazz narratives + more), what about those musicians who didn’t go on to be mega famous? What about the ones who stayed in their home towns, as part of a creative community? Aren’t they still important to the history of jazz?

I think, more and more, that teaching through experimentation, where the goal is to really figure out the limits of your own body, rather than to just recreate an step without self-reflexivity makes for better learning and teaching. Teachers who’re working with students who’re learning through experimentation learn how to manage a class full of people who aren’t just getting it ‘right’. They learn to be patient with students who struggle, and reassess the goals of the class. ‘Getting through material’, or ticking boxes, isn’t as important as spending time with a concept or movement and figuring out how it works from every angle. And you can’t really quantify this sort of learning. If the goal of a dance class is creative inspiration and creative play – making shit up – then being prepared to take risks is important for teachers and students.

For me, being a teacher and a student at the same time is really important. I have to regard my own teaching a work in progress. We don’t expect our students to ‘get it perfectly right’ in one class, so we don’t expect our own teaching to be ‘perfectly right’ in one class either. We rethink our goals, and aim for continuous-learning as teachers/students ourselves. And we aim for continuous-learning for our students as well.

I am extra sure that it’s absolutely essential to consider our dancing/teaching/work/learning as a never-ending process. We must assume that we are never going to be at the point of perfect recreation. We are always going to be learning and relearning. And self-reflexive learning (ie being aware of what we do and think) is central to this. Mindfulness again, I know. But I don’t mean self-reflexivity as a process of self-assessment and self-criticism. I mean self-reflexivity as a process of mindfulness and self-awareness. What am I doing at this moment, now? Sure, it mightn’t have been what I wanted, but that’s ok. It is one step in an ongoing process.

It’s a little bit like DJing. I can stop playing swing music from the swing era when we’ve danced to every song. I can stop learning when I’ve danced every step.

To sum up, then I think it’s important that we think of classes – the struggle – as more important than the performance – the product. Or, rather, the learning process is more important than an accumulated set of skills or achievements.

Lipsitz, George. “Songs of the Unsung: The Darby Hicks History of Jazz,” Uptown Conversation: the new Jazz studies, ed. Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, Farah Jasmin Griffin. Columbia U Press, NY: 2004: 9-26.

@robcorr has plopped this interesting quote up on his tumblr:

Vygotsky himself was absolutely clear that students do not learn by rote memorization. He states: “scientific concepts are not simply acquired or memorized by the child and assimilated by his memory but arise and are formed through an extraordinary effort of his own thought”, and contemporary scholars have argued that Vygotsky did not advocate the use of a simple “transmission” model of learning. Indeed, if we envision the ZPD [Zone of Proximal Development] not as a static zone to pass through or reach the end of, but rather as the continual unfolding of a zone of development that extends just beyond the growing, ever-developing ALD [Actual Level of Development] of the student, then we are more prone to understand teaching as an active, process-oriented relationship with ebbs and flows, growth and stagnation, leaps and pauses. To envision the ZPD of a student in such a way, a way that embraces learning and teaching as intertwined, dynamic, dialectical processes, does not allow for a simple transmission model of education. Rather, such a pedagogical vision requires that we be student-centered in our understanding ofwhere a student is developmentally, by building our instructional relationships based on that level of development, and by using ongoing, concentric feedback loops for the teacher or more capable peer to continually assess where a given student’s ALD and ZPD may lie. Additionally, we must remember that teachers, as developing individuals themselves, also have their own ALD and ZPD with regard to their understanding of both their teaching practice and their students. To recognize this also challenges the use of transmission models of teaching and learning within Vygotsky’s framework because it assumes that teachers themselves are also learning, developing, and growing. As Freire correcdy argues, such a conception of teaching and learning does not allow for didactic forms of instruction. Because neither teacher nor student are perfectly formed, all involved in educative relationships are in the process of learning and re-learning themselves and each other.
(Wayne Au, “Vygotsky and Lenin on learning: The parallel structures of individual and social development”, Science & Society, vol 71, no 3
(Source: lchc.ucsd.edu))

Yes, this dovetails nicely with my previous post ‘teaching challenges’, but more interestingly (for me), it resonates with criticisms of positivism in research practice. In a positivist research method, the assumption is that a researcher can simply extract ‘facts’ from the field through objective research.
In contrast, critical theory (especially in reference to the Frankfurt School) makes it clear that we can’t really do objective research in communities and culture, as who we are affects not only the way we interpret data gained in research, but how we collect data and devise research projects and tasks. Instead, it’s much more useful to go into a research project assuming that you’ll be doing subjective research. As a feminist scholar, I’d argue that it’s important that we then also clearly state who we are when we write about our research, and that we work to become aware of our privilege or power or lack thereof.

What does this have to do with drilling as a teaching tool? Drilling assumes that a teacher can just inject information into a student’s head, and that drilling is how we make this information stick. If you follow this thought to its ‘logical’ conclusion, if the information doesn’t stick, then the student simply hasn’t drilled enough; the fault is with the student.

But teaching isn’t science, and teaching and learning aren’t objective methods. They’re a complex relationship with all sorts of interesting things going on. By embracing diversity in a student cohort, and by embracing the idea of teacher not as objective scientist, we open our learning up to all sorts of happy unexpectedness. Also with the creativity.

…if I had more time and knew anything at all about the stuff in Rob’s quote up there, I’d like to go on and interrogate the concept of ‘cultural transmission’ in dance. There, the idea is that particular dance steps move between generations within a community, between communities, and across time through a range of unregulated channels. As I said in that last post, utility and cultural relevance determine whether or not a particular dance step is taken up or abandoned. It’s not a neat, clean, process, no matter how much Arthur Murray would have liked to think so. The most robust, socially sustainable dance communities do not centre on formal dance classes, they rely on – are built on – unregulated, uninstitutionalised creative practice. This, of course, is where I paint myself into a corner. If I was SRS about jazz dance as a vernacular dance, I wouldn’t teach in formal classes, I’d be all about informal teaching and learning on the social dance floor, in domestic spaces, and so on. I do battle with this tension. But my own way of dealing with it is to encourage our students to teach other people what they’ve learnt. To take their steps to the social floor and lead them, to actively take an hour with friends to show them how a step works, and to choreograph routines that incorporate this material. See one, do on, teach one.
The challenge for me, then, comes when I see other dancers who’ve never come to our classes benefitting from all the hard transcription, practice and teaching preparation we put into our poorly paid classes. Yes, that is the point of it – to see this stuff spring to life on the social dance floor. But then I’d also kind of like to make a bit of money for all our hard work. This, of course, is where I say to myself, “Self! Get over yourself! You can’t own a dance! And if you try, you are DOING IT WRONG.” Then I remind myself of Frankie: “Do it once and it’s yours, do it twice and it’s mine,” and take my sorry arse off to the studio to do some goddamn practice.

(NB this photo is by Helen Levitt, but I’m not sure what year :( )