Presentation by: Ashleigh Ritchie
Session: Session C | Time: 11:30AM – 11:50AM | Location: Room 202
With Higher Education (HE) increasingly seeing students as consumers and education as a commodity, more is required from educators in this context to evidence value for money while offering their students an education that is enriching and challenging to improve their lives beyond the service that is provided. In the dance education context within HE, this crossroads between providing a service and creating independent learners brings up our pedagogical past in order to question it to find our future. While traditional dance education has been seen as authoritarian and patriarchal, the recent shift toward more feminist and democratic teaching and learning styles within the context of HE allows for new ways of learning and teaching to emerge which can contribute positively to the discussion.
As Programme Manager for the BA (Hons) Ballet Education and Lecturer in Dance Teacher Education at the Royal Academy of Dance in London, UK, I am uniquely positioned to challenge my dance pedagogical practice to inspire my aspiring dance teacher students to do the same. In order to investigate my role as a lecturer, researcher, and teacher of future teachers, I developed a refined somatic imagery intervention as a tool to support a more democratic way of teaching and learning dance within this context. Through the development and employment of such a tool with undergraduate ballet and contemporary technique students, findings indicated that it was successful in offering more collaborative dialogue between teacher and student, a more focused learning experience and improved student attainment and motivation.
This presentation will discuss the research while questioning the role of the lecturer and student within HE.
This presentation will discuss how my own research practice impacted the educational experience of my students and challenges the narrative that students should be passive recipients of the gift of education.
Abstract: 635