Watched my 1st year students teaching Feldenkrais to a group of FE drama students as part of their PSA module. The assignment was a 10 minute warm up which incorporated their understanding of Voice, Movement and Feldenkrais. I was pleased that they all intepreted Feldenkrais as "a way of focusing on your body and what you do and how you stand" - which at their level of experience seemed good enough for me. I will comment on the individual recordings elsewhere.

This week has been all about finally tackling the final edit for TDPT article. One of the editor's notes prompted me to check how many Feldies are now working in HE Performer training in the UK and I was surprised to see that this number had grown considerably since November when I found 21 Guild members who identified themselves (including a couple of people I knew were doing the work e.g. Finborough Edinbourgh). The number has risen to 30 - many seem to be new graduates from various trainings and in the case of Canterbury, more than one Feldy in a department. This will help focus on who to interview for more in-depth analysis.

Had supervision session with Catherine Hayes on 09.03.15 and made hand written notes. Realised it would be useful to continue this blog archive to include my sessions with her as all will (probably) form part of the final portfolio.
We discussed Methdology. Catherine particularly discussed Phenomenology and Auto-ethnography in relation to my research. Specifically Modes of Reflection, reliability, authenticity. She mentioned Theological research which uses Reflection on Self to a great degree. Here is an extract from an email from Catherine as follow up to the session:
"It was great to catch up earlier. Adele Clarke's work develops Grounded Theory and is called 'Situational Analysis'. The other two I think we mentioned were in relation to Existential and Interpretive Phenomenology and are philosophers called Heidegger and Husserl. We mentioned them when we chatted about Phenomenology being a philosophy as well as a method"
I have a note about Butcher and Interpretative Phenomenology ...also found interesting reference to

Quinney, R Beyond the Interpretive: The Way of Awareness. Trying to gain access to this!

I've managed to blag an Inspection copy of Adele Clarke's book. Looks like I have a lot of reading to do over the next few months! I'm keen to start some form of interviews and observations towards the  summer and hope that Thomas Kampe's Symposium in June will kick start this as well as the publication of the journal article around the same time.

Spent this morning with my Yr.1 students who are preparing for an assessment next week on their Performance Skills Analysis module. They have to run a 10 minute warm up that incorporates Feldenkrais, voice and movement. They have been panicking about how to teach Feldenkrais and I had to be quite clear that I didn't expect them to become Feldenkrais teachers after six months' of weekly classes! Instead, I asked them to think about how bringing awareness and focus to the body would help in a warm up for performers. When each student then ran through their proposed warm up, I was extremely gratified to notice their careful use of language, asking participants to focus, notice and investigate. I was also very happy to feel that they truely encouraged and were interested in this type of work rather than doing this because " we have to - its for an assessment". Interesting to note that the majority of them elected to do the initial body scan in a standing position - this obviously connected for them and I was reminded of Kene Igwenou's experiments with this whilst teaching his students at Canterbury. I look forward to seeing the workshops next week and discovering how the participants respond!