Transmission, transactional and transformative learning

One of my initial ideas for my inquiry and one that plays on my mind daily is the silencing of a ballet dancer’s voice during training and how this effects us as professionals and human beings. Since graduating I have experienced working in professional ballet companies as well as in the fitness industry and during this time I have discovered how much I have grown to shy away from speaking up. During my training as a ballet dancer I was always taught to only speak when absolutely necessary and even then I would, I’d often be shot down for speaking up. Essentially I have grown up with the understanding that I must be told what to do and never question this. And now this has affected me going into my adult life, I have had to work hard to push past these boundaries of silence in order to put myself out there so that I can forward my career. For it is the 21st century, and my voice should never feel the need to be silenced.

Maybe I am the only one that feels this way, or maybe others are experiencing the same as me, but this is something I would like to find out. And then looking ahead to my career, work out how I can push past these boundaries and also how I can make a change in the studio for my students that I teach.

During my research into this idea I have been looking into teaching theories, 3 of which stand out;
- Transmission
- Transactional
- Transformative
I believe I experienced predominantly transmissional teaching (where knowledge is transmitted directly from teacher to student in a predetermined order). Transactional teaching was also a necessity where we would be encouraged to draw on our own past knowledge with current experiences in order to further our learning. But my intrigue is whether I can start to incorporate some more transformative teaching methods and whether or not this will have positive affects on the student and the ballet industry.

Transformative teaching was developed by Jack Mezirow. It provides opportunity for critical thinking and acting on new perspectives. Students are encouraged to question what they see as correct in order to become more open minded and break down barriers which may be holding them back from fully developing their capabilities and talents.

But could this work in the ballet studio? Ballet technique is essentially quite black and white, but could this help with how individuals can personally achieve the technique in their own way? And more than that, could it help us retain our individuality and allow us to be confident and speak up to promote ourselves and our beliefs?

References
https://www.learning-theories.com/transformative-learning-theory-mezirow.html 24/10/18;

Mezirow, J. (2009). Transformative learning theory. In J. Mezirow, and E. W. Taylor (Eds), Transformative Learning in Practise: Insights from Community.

Christie, M., Carey, M., Robertson, A., & Grainger, P. (2015). Putting transformative learning theory into practice. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 55(1), 10-30

Howie, P. & Bagnall, R. (2013). A beautiful metaphor: Transformative learning theory. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 32(6), 816-836

Johnson, A. (2015). Three views of teaching: transmission, transaction and transformation. [Blog] Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-views-teaching-transmission-transaction-andrew-johnson [Accessed 24 Oct. 2018].

An unanticipated lesson learnt

I haven’t had a chance to blog in a while and as much as I would like to say that this is because of my packed schedule it is unfortunately because I have suffered a technical disaster .... all my work somehow decided to delete itself (I’m not the most technical person, but for the life of me and all the people who I have gone to for help, we can not recover the work or figure out why it has disappeared!) 

So after a pretty major freak out, I have set about trying to manually recover everything that I had already done. Thankfully I hadn’t deleted my search history, so I have been able to rediscover the literature which had taken my interest. (Although having to essentially start from scratch again has been a pretty big set back and I am going to have to push to catch up again.) 

I have always backed up my work, but now I am taking further care to back up and then back up again (and then again...) I have updated all my storage plans and expanded on these where needed. I am now backing up my work to several different places as well as always remembering to email my work to myself after every session. In a way I am happy that this happened to me now closer to the beginning of the module as opposed to the end and I have certainly learnt a lesson from it which I desperately needed to share with everyone. 

My message is this guys - back up your work!!