Campus session 2, Reflective Practitioner

Campus Session 2

First and foremost, I think It was great to see some new faces and meet more people on the course. It's so interesting to see people from different walks of life and get there view on the course and the tasks. Lovely to finally meet Adesola who ran the session and is advisor to me and Melanie. :)
So, we did a little get to know you task at the beginning where we all introduced ourselves and said a little about who we are. We then got into pairs with someone who we didnt know and were asked to write one word to describe who we our i.e  teacher, performer etc.

I teamed up with Katie, I wrote 'singer' and Katie wrote 'Performer'. We swapped papers and had to write down everything that we think that word entails. For Katie and 'Perforner' I wrote things like, bright lights. used to dissappointment, thrill of being on stage etc. For me and my word 'singer', Katie wrote, trained all her life, natural talent, expesive singing lessons, expressive, active. I found it interesting that Katie and I have pratically the same training and Laine and Italia Conti and yet she has classed herself as an all round performer and I have pigeonholed myself somewhat as a singer. I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but or whether I just picked my dream job. Obviously I am a performer, but my heart has always lied in singing. But it was really intersting to see what other people view your life as and how I view hers just off of one word.

The Graffiti Wall

In the session Adesola first reaarranged the room to create a better space. We moved the tables out of the way and ended up with this table acting as a notice board. I think the key idea here was to not accept everything as it comes. Once we began, Adesola divided the board up into three columns, 'See', 'Notice' and 'Think' and we were then asked to add to it as the session continued. The importance of this task was that it made us aware that though we 'See' things at face value, and we occasionally 'Notice' we do not always 'Think' into what is behind what we are seeing. Though it is fine to just 'see' things and not 'think' about them, the task allowed us to reflect and show us that we do it more than perhaps we thought we did. It made us aware of something we do subconsciously.

The Canes

No we haven't jumped back to the 1950's. In the session we got into partners between who, we had 2 canes. The idea of the exercise was to hold the canes by each of us having just one finger on each end and then to move around, and if we dropped the cane, we needed to cheer and clap.

Reflection of the exercise showed that some were much  more adventurous with the movement of the cane, some didnt seem worried if it dropped, others were much more concentrated on not letting it drop, and others showed to either lead or be happy just to carefully follow.

I think I was very adventurous with the cane, I wanted to see how big a range of movement we could get with the canes however I was very careful not to let it drop. After working with 2 different partners we then all got into one big group to do the task. The cane dropped quite quickly but it was good fun.

Postcard tours

 The next exercise was really intereseting. Adesola scattered lots of different postcoards over a table and we each had to pick three that stood out to us for whatever reason. In groups of three, we took it in turns to put the postcards around the room, anywhere we liked, and then take the rest of the group silently on a tour of the postcards. Once we had all finished our tours we gave eachother feedback on what the tour had meant to us. I chose three pictures, that in a way I feel represent certain aspects of my life or feelings I've had often. For example, I love the solitude that comes with each one that I chose, a calm and peaceful feeling with in each but still, you do not expect others to pick up on why you've chosen your post cards.

Everyone had different choices, I looked at Katie and Hannahs. Katie's was very colour co-ordinated with where she placed it around the room and Hannah's was all to do with animals. I wonder if Katie chose the places intentionally (where she had placed her postcards) because they were quite representative of the pictures themselves. For example the picture she chose of the Farmer and his work horse was at the back of the room where we had to sort of climb to get to it. I think the making it hard work to get to the picture represented the tired look of the farmer and his horse. However, this may be completely unintentional!

Katies feedback of my 3 postcards:

- 2 dramatic photos (emphasis on the main focus)
- Old portaits, old fashioned
- No obvious colour co-ordination with the background of the room
- Creative
- No relationships between the photos, variety

In a way I think Katie is not far off. The images are creative and old fashioned, and I like that she has picked up on that. I would say that the relationaship between the photos is that they are all so different. They each have a different viewpointn of the world. One of my hobbies is flying, and I was reminded of how different the world looks from thousands of feet up in the air by the picture of the workmen, and what they must be seeing, and how far away from the rest of the world they all are.

Linking back to the graffiti wall, this execise showed us that images that at first we just 'See' and accept can have a meaning and alot more to them if we take the time to 'Notice' and to 'Think' about them.

The campus session was really helpful to encourage us to reflect and open our eyes a bit more and I hope that my brief summary here has helped anyone who missed it. I will be adding a little bit more regarding theorists that were covered briefly during the session as soon as possible. :)