Affiliation
This is particularly important to me as a dancer as everyday as I am expected to work around and form “close relatioships” with not just my cast mates but with passengers and other crew members aboard the ship Crisp & Turner explain this theory.They go onto explaining this theory more explaining Affiliation as a social process that in fact “satisfies a psychological need by providing us with a network of support that will help us when we are in need” I can relate to this with my choreographers and teachers as I find it easier to talk to them about career issues and problems i may have if I can socially and comfortably approach them, the more, this is the same with friends and family, the more i affiliate with them the more I can rely on them and as Crisp & Turner say I can “satisfy a psychological need” with that being bringing happiness,support,love,help anxiety or confidence.
A principle of Affiliation that I find interesting is that of homeostatis (O’Connor & Rosenblood, 1996).They both state that our need for affiliation may differ within each of us such as the introverts and extroverts of people and also even be controlled by ‘psychological determinants and individual and cultural differences between individuals’.(Hofstede 1980) This is completely true, as I socialise around the ships I find that in culture The Americans always seem very bubbly, and alot louder in general and there culture of affilition seems to stand out alot,when teaching children you get some quieter children and some louder children, its important to socially connect to these quieter children maybe a little more so that they can start the process of affiliation themselves.
I do agree that for performers professional networking and an extension of innate capacity and need to affiliate is a main key for survival as professionals. It backs up the saying my mother always used to tell me ‘If you dont ask you dont get’. For example If I as working with an amazing,high status and powerful choreographer, By affiliating,socialising,analysing ,asking questions and “picking there brains’ I am in fact learning important tools and qualities that may help me as a professional, from past experience I have been guided from teachers and people I have affiliated well with and they have in fact recommended me and led me into a sucessful starting career.Examples include auditioning for certain jobs and dance schools and referances for jobs and interviews.We can attract these individuals that we wish to benefit from by generally being polite,well behaved and showing interest in that person or there subject to ‘satisfies a psychological need’of ourselves. But then if we are affiliating with them what ‘psychological need’ do they have in order to wanting to affiliate back with us.Well, my view on this is that I think these established practitioners were once in our posistions in there younger lives and so we share this psychological need to strive forward in life to make it as a professional, they want to see us succeed and can feel great showing a young person the way forward as It reminds them how they made it in life just as You would feel great showing someone maybe a certificate or medal you won but twice as important! This is why we did many workshops in my training at The Hammond where our teachers would bring establised practitioners into our enviroment as our teachers could see that we would benefit and could maybe satisfy a psychological need.
constructionism
For this part of the reader i found myself really thinking deeply about the source of everthing in the world and how it became to be found and constructed by us as human beings.I almost had to strip everything away and think of things from the roots, another way of thinking this was like thinking of the ingredients before making the cake.(Humphrey 1993, p 17) made me understand constructionism alot more clearly by describing things in the world like volcanoes and trees, before we lived on earth none of these had names or meaning but untill we actually came and studied all these worldly things we contructed them gave them meanings,explanations name and images that come to our mind when we say any object like cat , weed, cup, scarf. We as humans constucted them and can now represent them in our mind. This is related in my professional practice with steps like a jazz parder ball ray and a demi plie, and can even relate to experiences I understand more now from doing them. For example before I started auditioning I was told it would be hard but it was only untill i started doing them myself did i construct an audition properly and witnessed it for myself.The most exciting thing is that there are still things to be constructed for example when we look up at night we see stars but is there more to it than we think ? Has anyone studied ever single star, they must be different types so surely they should have different names and constructions,this is the same about beyond the unniverse, what is beyond that, until someone studys it and finds out there will be no knowledge and name for whatever is out there!
Connectivism
This is a process of learning using the internet and digital technologys, a good example of it is me right now using web 2.0 and the readers to learn about this topic, if I didnt have blogspace you tube and emailing to speak to my tutor I wouldnt be learning anything. This also goes into my professional practice as well by using the internet to find jobs auditions and workshops which in return will help me learn and suceed in my career. Connectism is the way forward and in my oppinion is better than books or papers, it makes things quicker, easier and more exciting to look at, Going back to my GCSES and for alot of children in general I used to revise over the internet using online test papers and study programmes like bitesize. I also used a digital programme to revise for my theory test in my driving. I personally feel that I am better in using these techniques rarther than the traditional way of learning such as book reading or sitting in a class room for an hour listenning to a teacher, however everyone is different, for most people the traditional method is getting overlooked and I feel that this course is a perfect example of how fabulous connectivism can be.
Driscoll (2000) defines learning as “a persisting change in human performance or performance potential...[which] must come about as a result of the learner’s experience and interaction with the world”. This I can relate to as myself I learn from experience, being so young I am experiencing new things everyday that i havent perhaps come across before but then does that mean old people dont learn as much as perhaps as I would in a day? This I find very interesting.Currently i write this as I am going throught the panama canal locks, this amazing system I had only heard about but had never experienced it before, going back to Discrolls theory i sit here watching the gates close and see how the system works for myself. Everything seems so much clearer to me and i am able to understand the amazing creation made by man.
I went on further reading how Driscoll (2000, p14‐17) explores some of the complexities of defining learning.The one I found particularly interesting was the content of our knowledge – Is knowledge actually knowable? Is it directly knowable through human experience? I would love to look into this more, something I find hard to believe like what is the surface of mars made of ? from researching this I found that no human being had ever walked on mars however a whole library of information still came up about the planet. So how do we actually know if its correct ?
Information is always being updated and is rapidly growing, its exciting for me as a young person to know that there is aways so much more to learn in any subject even in my professional practice and how this will never ever change even when i reach an old age.
The reader showed me that learning doesn’t have to just be about school,books and numbers it can be an experience or even a decision, a process I never really thought about with this topic, if I was to make a wrong decision and experience the bad side of something I would learn something from that so as next time i learn to take the correct descison.
Communities of Practice
This is a process we use to learn through each other. The reader quotes “Members of a community of practice come together because of mutual interest and generate a shared experience of engagement in the community of practice. This can produce technical knowledge about a discipline, but brings much greater benefits, allowing the community of practice to develop its own identity and symbolism of what it is to be a member of that specific community of practice”. A good example of this in my professional practice was in my school dance troupe many years ago. We would come together at lunchtimes and share our ideas and choreography movements as a group,slowly forming the branches of a dance number, we would learn from each other the different steps and ideas and as a whole we formed a sucesesful and engaging dance troupe and family that many other pupils in my school wanted to be part of. I can apply Wenger’s three identified dimensions into practice with my example
- What it is about – A dance troupe understood and continually renegotiated by its current new and inspiring members
- How it functions ‐ A fantastic relationship and engagement between everyone that binded members together into a social connection through enjoyment through dancing
- entity - What capability it has produced – A fantastic repetoire of numbers and productions shared to the school and community
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