Ten Things I Wish I Had Done When I Was A Highland Dancer

Some food for thought for competitive highland dancers. Doing some of these things may prevent some of the problems I hope to look into as part of my practitioner enquiry research….

http://www.thesportingjoint.com/blog/2015/6/8/ten-things-i-wish-i-had-done-when-i-was-a-highland-dancer

I particularly agree with number 8 as I supplemented highland with ballet, jazz and street styles over the years and was a much better dancer for it.

Laban Analysis

This weekend I have had some time to reflect on the new module – Context and Culture in Dance – and the work we have undertaken so far in our practical sessions.

We started our first session by looking at Laban Analysis which is a method and language for describing, visualising, interpreting and documenting all varieties of human movement. It originates from the work of Rudolf Laban and is based around the basic principles of actions, space, dynamics and relationships. This is a good way to encourage pupils to start to think about creating their own new and unique movement phrases.

We use LABAN analysis in S3 when pupils start their National Progression Award level 4. It works as stimulus for how pupils might start to create their own choreography sequences and gives them the start of a theoretical understanding of analysis. This works well in my classroom/studio environment and just as done in the picture above can be completed as a group activity. With a thorough understanding of LABAN analysis pupils feel more confident when beginning their own choreography.

The links between injuries and self-esteem

I have wanted to explore this for some time as I highlighted it as a potential problem faced by competitive highland dancers in my research project and have been suffering from a long term injury myself. This is now having a knock-on impact on my Context and Culture in Dance module.

I looked up an article this evening which had some interesting thoughts on the impact of injuries on athletes:

“An injury is a traumatic experience for anyone who has devoted a lot of time and energy to fitness and recreational achievements.” (Ball, 2002)

I agree strongly with this as I first suffered a bad injury to my foot six years ago when I was competing at a relatively high standard. Although I recovered and was able to compete again it was always much harder work and I was tentative at times when before the injury I would have experimented. In the last two years my foot injury has come back and I have had to retire from competitive highland dancing. Although I still perform when I can I have not even been able to attend a competition class for nearly a year and feel my self-esteem has been affected as highland dancing was what I considered I was good at and now I don’t even have that. Some of the research suggests that this then affects a person’s ability to recover…

“The psychological factors that contribute to injury are viewed primarily as stress-related…(There is) a direct relationship between life stresses and injury rate.” (Williams and Andersen, 1998)

If competition itself is stressful does this make competitive highland dancers more prone to injury than other non-competitive dancers?

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross discusses psychological reactions to exercise and athletic injuries as having a five-stage grief response: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and reorganisation.

This is an interesting way of viewing injuries and I certainly recognise some of these feelings. It may be important to add a research question to my project looking directly at these responses.

“When a person’s self-concept is almost entirely tied to exercise goals or athletic success, the self-concept will assuredly suffer in the face of an injury…Many athletes…who suffer a lengthy injury experience decreases in self-esteem and self-worth and increases in anxiety and depression.” They fear the embarrassment or ridicule they associate with poor performance. (Eldridge, 1983)

I agree particularly with the last statement as this fear of failure comes hand-in-hand with the competitive environment and is something I highlighted already in my project proposal and is something I look forward to investigating further.

Final Poster Presentation

The aim of my research is to explore the impact of competitive highland dancing on the self-esteem and confidence of teenage girls between 16 and 18 years old. I am particularly interested in the potential negative impacts. I will explore this impact through a qualitative research study looking at the advantages and disadvantages of the competitive environment, the feelings generated from not doing well and how those feelings affect dancers in everyday life. I have already looked in-depth at the competitive environment of dance through studies by Samantha Sobash and Donna Krasnow, Lynda Mainwaring and Gretchen Kerr. I will conduct my own research using a focus group and hope to find an answer as to whether or not there are negative impacts and if so, what they are. Following completion of my study I will disseminate my findings to my own school, to the SQA and to the Scottish Official Board of Highland Dancing.

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?page=view&resid=2DE474261BC1D0C8!106&authkey=!ALKsGaiaTfngWxM

Working on my presentation…

Tonight I am working on my poster presentation based on my feedback. The main points are:

Literature research should stand alone without the need for dialogue so I will need to add a few more slides to summarise my findings.
The ethics slide also needs more from the dialogue.
Research questions should come before the methodology.
Work on dissemination slide – how are you going to spread the word to other schools?
Include the benefits of practitioner enquiry to me personally.
Add a bibliography slide.

I have never done a poster presentation for an assessment before so I am quite pleased with it but I now understand that it needs to stand alone as if the people seeing it will not also be hearing what I say.

Enhancing Self-Esteem in the Classroom

Enhancing Self-Esteem in the Classroom is a book by Denis Lawrence which looks at many interesting concepts related to my research including a clarification of what self-esteem is and why it is important:

“Self-esteem is the individual’s evaluation of the discrepancy between self-image and ideal self. It is an affective process and is a measure of the extent to which the individual cares about this discrepancy.”

Lawrence also goes onto say in his opening chapter that “unrealistic demands may result in self-esteem” and perhaps this goes some way to explaining one of the issues which may arise from competitive dance. However, if teachers make no demands than pupils tend not to succeed so a balance must be struck and it is important to remember during my research and personally that there are many advantages to taking part in competition and pushing yourself to be the best.

There is a really helpful chapter on assessing self-esteem which I will examine closely as I work towards conducting my research as there are interesting questions and links to other research from this area and following this Lawrence dissects what teachers can do in the classroom to enhance self-esteem. This may be particularly important for me to delve into depending on the results of my study.

The final chapter explores the teacher’s self-esteem and the influence this can subconsciously have on their pupils if they are not aware of their own self-confidence and self-image. If I went through the competitive dance scene and the results of my study show a clear correlation between low self-esteem and competitive highland dance could that be having a knock-on effect on the youngsters I teach?

Lawrence, D. (1996). Enhancing Self-Esteem in the Classroom. London: Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd.

Poster Presentation – 21st April 2016

I was disappointed not to be able to deliver my presentation live last night due to a faulty mic. I was all ready for it so last night after watching everyone else’s I recorded my voice over the top of each slide saying what I would have said live:

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?page=view&resid=2DE474261BC1D0C8!106&authkey=!ALKsGaiaTfngWxM

Creative vs Technical Dance

Today we had our first practical dance session of the course focussing on creativity and how to encourage young people to be more creative. This was really interesting because it is an area which I think is often inhibited by the competitive and serious nature of highland dance which I am exploring in my own research.

We started with a warm-up focussing on relaxing the body – something my highland, ballet and jazz training fought against.

Yvonne encouraged us to leave our technical abilities at the door and just be free but it took me a while to get used to that style – I always want to know exactly what to do and one of the reasons for my research proposal is that I believe the high level of techinical training and competitive nature of my training may have resulted in this.

As the day went on, however, I got more into it and found my ‘5-year-old’ self. In terms of the next module, Context and Culture in Dance, I learnt a lot about teaching primary dance and how to inspire younger pupils to be more creative using a theme and stimuli.

Working on Reflection

This is an area I find difficult to analyse and quantify. I do a lot of informal reflection on a daily basis as a teacher practitioner but have not often been able to put this succinctly into my Masters work as yet. As I prepare for my Poster Presentation I have been looking at Schön’s model of ‘reflection in and reflection on’ which I highlighted in a previous blog and more recently on Kolb’s Learning Cycle which I have found really useful in breaking down the evaluation process.

In terms of my specific research question I have looked at the problems I face in dance delivery, reflected on that experience, developed my idea for my research from this reflection and hope to be able to test my assumptions through my research proposal. The problem I find is that many of our best dancers often face difficulties developing motifs for their choreography. They seem scared to try things which may not work and instead play too safe. This got me thinking about why, as we have a number of dancers with top 10 world championship places in their fields – is there a correlation therefore between the competitive nature of their dancing and lack of creativity? I believe it impacts the self-esteem and self-confidence they need in order to be prepared to fail or ‘not be perfect’. Therefore, how can I alter my practice to limit the negative impacts caused by competitive highland dance in particular?

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Category: Practitioner Enquiry