Influence with a positive and negative effect

Skype session - Monday 30th September.

The Skype session was a journey through reflection. The idea of being surrounded by the same entity (the internet and social media), but it having a different effect on people, positive or negative. How have you come to being at this stage in your practice? What is your practice? Have your teachers influenced how you are in your professional practice today? The question of influence mostly hit home for me as it is something I have recently thought about.

I asked myself so many questions. How have my teachers influenced me and what can I take away from my learning experience as a positive? What negatives do I need to shed? Has a bad experience been made into a positive and influenced the way I carry our my professional practice? Or has that experience been blocked/shed, and maybe overlooked what positives could have been taken away from the experience?

I think the reality of it is, we do not realise how much we are affecting the thought process of, and impression we leave on, a learner. I read a very interesting book that heavily powered my thinking on this topic. Evolutionary Playwork and Reflective Analytic Practice, by Bob Hughes. He talks about play experiences and explains the thought process and chemical reactions in the brain that take place along the journey. Part of the reason for writing the book, was for parents to better improve their way of teaching play, rules and guidelines to their children and how this impact shapes their future play experiences.

“A child playing in an environment that only contains negative experiences will have his or her expectations manipulated towards the negative, i.e., the more negative effect s/he derives from playing, the more negativity s/he will learn to expect.” (Hughes 2013)

This can also be said about situations with an over-indulgence on positivity. You expect that situation to be the same every time and for the same outcome, but there will most likely be a mix of both positive and negative. Is it this expectancy of an approaching situation that we know to be negative, we overlook how we can overcome the subject and we continue along the same negative path?

“The impact of his or her experience upon his or her neurological structures and brain chemistry leave the child with no other choice” (Hughes 2013)

It is good to be critical and think about our negative experiences as we can delve a little deeper and maybe shed the experience and replace it with a new one. Within our industry, we receive a lot of feedback, neglect and pointers on how to make ourselves better. Indulge on that feedback, but why stop there? We solely rely on what we have been taught but I feel that the best thing to teach is that there are no boundaries. Be who you want to be, and better.

It was kind of Adesola to share her own experience and opinion of how she sometimes feels within her work environment. She was told by one of her teachers that she was “not good enough”. In some situations, this made her feel like she was  “ An intruder in my own practice”. It is negative experiences like this that either have to be over looked and you battle on, or you reflect for a moment and think 'why is that statement being made, and what can I do to positively overcome that?' My thoughts are that if you opt for the first option, somethings may be overlooked. And here comes the self confession, I myself have done this. Received a negative comment and then totally blocked it out of my mind because it was too hurtful to absorb and filter. This word is going to keep popping up; reflection. It is this reflection that we can tackle negative experiences at at later stage, and look into the steps we lost and the feedback un-taken. What we think we have taken away from a bad experience may be different to the intentions of the teacher, but it is up to us to critically look back and see if something was overlooked. After all, sometimes it is these negative experiences that build up our strength and resilience.

One of my experiences was the careers advisor at my sixth form saying to me "you will never make a living out of dance". Word for word burned into my feelings like a knife. But it wasn't until recently I questioned why she came to this conclusion. Why did she want to steer me away from my passion? Has she had a negative experience which in turn she is rubbing off onto me? Why did she want to share this with me? So I asked a few people at my work place with children what their thoughts are on a career in dance. I feel that some people weren't very honest and brushed over the subject, but a few were brutal; which may be lucky for my blog not necessarily for me. Their view was that it was very limited and there isn't much money in the industry unless you make it big time. Some of their points were valid, but others not so much. From my negative experience, this powered me on to be my absolute best, but I feel that others might have been impacted to shy away from pursuing what they want. 

Reflecting back to what I read in the book by Hughes, this was the first situation that popped into my mind:

My dance teacher was fantastic and I am still in awe of the environment that she created for all of her students, but, when she retired, I had to transfer to a different school. They were a very exam based school. Every year a ballet, modern and tap exam was to be completed as well as work for the shows, which left no or little time for creativity. The rigid structure of syllabus work and learning a dance from someone else telling me how to portray every move was restrictive. When I asked my teacher if I could create my own ballet solo and showed a section that I created, she laughed and told me it wasn't what people wanted to be watching and instructed me to just follow what she has already set for me. That lack of freedom affected me when it came to choreographing. I knew I always had material in me, but felt like I was totally out of my depth. This because my teacher laughed at what I had created and after I had transferred schools I had not been given the chance to be creative and experiment. With encouragement from my community of practice, this is something that I have managed to overcome but it is something that I often think about when creating a piece. I guess it did make me stronger and to strive for better, but it was not with ease. This is something that I didn't want my students to get into the habit of, so as a result, I made it my aim to try to be invested in something that I don’t enjoy because of a negative experience or just for the pure fact that I don't enjoy it. I believe this, in turn, will positively contribute to my students learning and their holistic journey. I want to erase the cloud hanging over something that makes my skin crawl so that my students don't have the same qualms about it. 

Bibliography: 

HUGHES, B. (2013). Evolutionary playwork. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, p. 129.