Pedagogy: Reinventing Your Practice
July 12-14, 2024
12-5 PM Live @ The Floor In Brooklyn
Standard Price: $450
Plus Mentorship Package: $650
Payment plans available. Please inquire matthewabdances@gmail.com
About this Course
This course is intended for new teachers, who want to understand how to structure their material efficiently and experienced teachers, who want to interrupt their habits and deepen their practices. This is for anyone who considers themselves a teacher in any medium. Although there will be movement in the workshop, all genres of material are welcome. We will focus on some of the essential facets of skilled teaching, including:
Working from a personal voice and mission.
Developing a class session architecture that allows for growth.
Finding the balance between planning and improvising.
Deepening the ability to meet students where they are.
Inventing creative imagery and accessing clear, non-violent language.
Illuminating how our lineage both supports and limits our thinking.
Writing about your work in a way that is evocative, clear, and compelling.
Learning to clarify our intentions on both micro and macro planes and
developing strategies to both create and guide those intentions.
Creating structures for how you teach that specifically support what, where,
and who you teach.
Strategizing ways to bring our whole selves into the teaching experience,
including keeping our needs in the room, and learning to find efficient
recuperative systems to heal from the stress of teaching.
This is for anyone who considers themselves a teacher in any medium. All subjects of material are welcome.
Class Description
We will be moving, talking, writing, and observing through many lenses and participants will be teaching in small formats throughout the course. This course aims to help you find yourself as a teacher and to create structures that allow your students to access the material in the most efficient and joyful way.
Class will begin with a discussion topic, including:
Exertion and Recuperation: how do we find balance especially with online learning? We will examine how to create an ecosystem of effort, where you are balancing leading and following, speaking and listening, creating and honing, and finding an amalgam of instinct and analysis.
Inner/Outer: how do we find our voice, own our pedagogical inheritance, and develop an authentic, unique teaching methodology? We will consider what was handed down to us and how much of that aligns with our deepest vision. We will challenge ourselves to line up who we want to be in the world with how we are teaching.
Stability/Mobility: how can we foster a balance between what we lean into and what moves us? We will discuss the benefits of improvisation vs. planning, question power structures between students and teachers, and work on letting our content find its true form.
Function/Expression: how do we develop compelling imagery, de-code learning styles, and find the poetry of cueing? We will break down the 9 styles of learning and examine how to lead class in a way that includes different types of learners. We will explore the power of language to ignite, calm, and unify our students.
Discussion will be followed by writing, creation and teaching around the topic. There will be an optional discussion group online about the readings. This is a course in Pedagogy overall, though we will begin with a seminar and brainstorm session geared towards our current needs to shift rapidly to online teaching. While we will discuss methods for applying each of the topics to online models, this class is for teachers who are interested in examining their teaching practices as a whole, devising new strategies, letting go of givens and old patterns, and aligning the practices with their deeper vision.
What this course includes:
Basic Package ($625):
live meetings with a cohort of other artists/educators
Reading and video material
Writing assignments
Creative assignments
Access to a private group to discuss readings and discussion topics
References to online databases, free movement instruction, meditation and somatic practices
Both in person and virtual teaching practices and guides
One free year of Praxispace membership, our online artistic community
Mentorship package includes the above plus (additional $250):
Two one-hour private phone or skype calls with Alexandra to target specific pedagogical questions, create syllabi, work through issues both macro and micro related to teaching.
Feedback from Alexandra on one syllabus, class description, or teaching philosophy
This additional cost for reflects a pro-rated version of Alexandra’s usual private mentorship rate.