Friday we had an impromptu skype chat. We
continued on our discussion about aspects of practice but took steps ‘out’ to
critically look at our own assumptions and discourses as we discussed. The
Skype discussion groups are most useful for this as they allow you to practice
the critical reflection and thinking-feeling that the course is asking you to
develop (to MA level standards). We confirmed how the AOLs are critical
reflections on your past experiences through looking at how past experiences
have shaped your ideas and also how these ideas link to existing literature.
How do you ‘know’ some thing is true (for
you). The AOLs ask you to look at your past career to see where you learnt your
foundation of practice – where you learnt from experiences. Keep remembering
this across the whole course.
For
instance: Chelsie ‘knows’ that having a cultural context to her teaching of
Dance Hall is an important part of her teaching practice – students need to
understand the cultural background of the movement not just do the movement.
There is literature that discusses this idea she can draw on. But how does she
‘know’ this? Thinking back this idea started to be something she learnt from
when she was performing in China and realised her understanding of the movement
she was performing was not at a level where she could really understand the
movement itself: she noticed her own lack of cultural context made the movement
she was doing incomplete. So, this learning was the seed of informing her
practice/curriculum development of her classes today. The literature she finds
around this helps her also give further context to learning as she sees what
other practitioners have approached this idea and where her own innate
understanding and values sit in the larger field of this topic.
Of course, across all the Modules you are
doing this triangulation of experience-data, personal reflection, and
literature.
So to set the cat amongst the pigeons what
do you think of truth. The framework of this course sees ‘truth’ as constructed
but does this mean anything goes? This Ted Talk is really interesting in terms
of exploring this.
Its very disheartening to hear her say 'Truth and Facts are under assault'.One thing I learnt from this talk is that, in life we do face hard challenges, but that could be resolved within a short time only if we ACT NOW!! Thus I beleive that facts are always true, but truth is not always confined to facts--though it should be.
ReplyDeleteYes "there are certain things that are true" and in this context, "truth is not relative". The important part of it is however 'in this context'. It is the context which tells you with what kind of truth you are confronted with. There is the truth that is constructed upon facts and can be proved, and there is the truth that is self-referential and cannot be proved. The latter is constructed upon individual stories and therefore relative. In this Ted talk, this difference is not made. I personally find it a bit dangeruous to say that truth is not relative, even though I understand her point of view. But maybe me too I have to be more careful when I say that truth is relative. Maybe I should rather say that the concept of truth is relative. You first need to define what truth means to you or in what context you are debating in before deciding whether truth is or isn't relative.
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