Critical Reflection on my Professional Practitioner Inquiry

Module 2 has created pathways in developing my inquiry. I have discovered more about my practice (dance) and its environment through a challenging new phase of my life, unemployed and injured and thus from an outside perspective, with the support from various fellow dancer friends and teachers at the UCT ballet school and worldwide. By finding out other theories on research, being actively involved in discussion groups, and most importantly questioning about the professional ballet world, I have been able to have a clear vision of an inquiry I would so love to explore into and share- the deeper meanings of why ballet dancers enjoy dancing so much, and what are their inspirations and motivations to keep them going? The tasks have helped tremendously in its development.

Part 4- developing ideas

Professional inquiry is a ‘way to learn about what you are doing.’ The three distinct learning mechanisms that helped with the development of my inquiry were:

·      Work Based learning-idea came about gaining some invaluable experience within a work-based environment.

·      Double loop learning

·      Transdisciplinary

I developed lines of inquiry in Health and Fitness and Artistry vs. Sport. Though seeming quite far-fetched from the final inquiry, the discovery process brought me to the finished product:

·      Creating mind maps all relating to the idea of my enthusiasm in a well being of a dancer, mentally and physically, to find inspiration in the explanation of why I love what I do.

·      SIG groups- looking at others’ questions

·      Watching the Cape Town international Competition, but most importantly whilst injured

·      Light bulb idea

I was able to gain more insight from the SIG groups on my decided topic as well as from some other ballet dancer’s responses. I surprisingly gained thorough feedback, picking up on key points in their reasoning to dance, the motivational aspects as well as arising problems.

I used some of these key themes for researching literature:

Þ   Music is a known factor of inspiration, looking into more scientific articles to gain reasoning behind this wonderful relationship of ‘moving to the beat’ and why it happens.

Þ   Anthropology en Pointe is a blog all about motivation and ballet dancers:

o   Numerous topics discussed relate to my idea.

o   Explores the possibility of dancers being able to relate to  ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’ where this profession is believed to provide us with every need categorized in this pyramid.

o   Biggest inspiration to create a video footage as part of the finished project.

Þ   Motivation itself is what keeps a dancer going through everything, which could easily link to the various ‘theories of motivation.’

I thus realised the fundamental reason to dancing is the enjoyment, therefore narrowing it down to why dancers enjoy dancing.

Part 5- Ethics

By first distinguishing how ethics is involved in my profession, to researching what is expected opened up my eyes to what ethics entails. I learnt about the connection between ethics and morality, relating to not your individual self but also in a professional environment. Researching more into the ethics in professional dance, I discovered the idea of sticking to basic moral grounds to then be able to work around the rules for the greater benefit. Therefore being able to move on to using this knowledge for my own inquiry.

Part 6- Planning Inquiry

Before going into too much detail about the tools of inquiry, I had decided to use a more qualitive method for my inquiry- feeds off personal experiences, feelings and opinions. After reading about different tools, I decided to use interviewing as my main source of data collection as well as surveys to initiate ideas, and literature sources to gain more knowledge and evidence about the topic.

From testing the pilot interviews I was able to find out my approach to anaylsing the information, gaining advice and general sub-topics.