Task 6C - Award Specialism Title

Award Specialism Title - BA (Hons) Professional Practice in Arts (Dance)

Since the age of 3 Dance has been my life, through every dance class as a young girl then continuing my studies at Stella Mann Dance Colege where I gained my level 6 Diploma in Professional Dance. I have then gone on to dance around the world and I have no intentions of letting my love of dance fade away.
I would like to continue my career of dancing after performing to a lot of other avenues, so I would like to keep my title quite broad on the spectrum. This will then enable me to either continue performing or go on to teaching at a higher level than I already do. I am organising a dance festival which I hope will continue to grow so there is plenty more on the horizon that I wish to discover with Dance.

For my inquiry I would like to focus on what performance means to trained and untrained individuals, and how it features in their lives.
By focusing on both trained and untrained I can gain the perspective of the fans of performance, people that have never taken to the stage but love going to support.
I can also speak to people who trained to be a performer and then didn't perform, whether it be through their own choice or not. I can also speak to people who are still peforming and then people who have perform and aren't anymore.
I would like to find out the back ground reasons for their involvement within the arts and why?

6B: Testing the 4 methods of enquiries

Task 6B was to try and test the 4 methods of inquiry to try and find the limits and merits of each tool in relation to how they work within my own inquiry,

They are:

• Interviews
• Surveys
• Focus Groups
• Documents

Interviews

Limits

• Can take up a lot of time asking everyone individually
• Could go off on a tangent and not answer the question needed 
• Difficult to take up other peoples time when I know how precious it is.
• May not agree to it for professional reasons or want you publishing their personal results

Merits

• Easily repeated: same set of questions and could get a different answer each time
• More personal so people may open up more
• I can choose which questions I ask and add any additional ones in if i feel it going off on a tangent
• Answers can be easily recorded and referred back to.
• Uncover unexpected data

Surveys

Limits

• You can't elaborate on a question in case the candidate doesn't understand so you may have incorrect answers
• Can be very quantitative so only yes or no answers
• As its time consuming you may not have accurated answers or be able to divulge as much as you want to as people are answering quickly.

Merits

• Can be sent out to alot of people at one time, less time consuming for you.
• Can remain anonymous so may attract more people willing to give their input and opinions but those who may not be able to share them if identified
• You have all the data recorded when the survey is sent back to you

Focus groups

Limits

• People may not want to open up in front of others
• Can't remain anonymous 
• Time consuming
• May go too far off on a tangent
• Would need to do more than one group as similar people may all be swayed by each other

Merits

• Can talk to alot of people at once
• Can bounce ideas off of each other
• more of a discussion and less intense than an interview
• can easily be recorded for use at a later date

Documents

Limits

• Would be quite hard to find documents which relate exactly to your inquiry, so could lead you off on a tangent.
• Policy may have changed since the document was written
• Time consuming to analayse each one which may not be any good anyway

Merits

• Easily accessible on web 2.0
• Would gain the persons in depth opinion on the matter
• Would help to have another persons inquiry ideas to help start your own and other avenues you may wish to develop further.

I think for my inquiry I will use a combination of Interviews, focus groups and documents. I feel that as my inquiry is about personal feelings and experiences this may not be able to come across in an online survey, i feel as if I need to communicate with the participant and put across what I am asking of them. To hopefully get a more in depth answer.

I think a focus group of similar minded people would be great to bounce ideas back and forth but then reverse this idea and interview them individually and see if their answers were still the same when not influenced by others.

I think documents would also be a great idea as it would give me access to this mind of those I would otherwise not be able to speak to and to gain professional opinions.

Task 6A: Review of Reader 6 and a trial run!

Task 6A was to review reader 6 which contains a number of different tools which we can use when carrying out our inquiry, Module 2 is all about the preparation and planning for our Module 3 inquiry, this way we can see which tools work for us and provide the outcomes that we need and which don't.
By using our SIG groups we can test out through trial and error before we are released on the general public to try and research our inquiry.

The reader suggests how research can be carried out in a qualitative (what people have said) or a quantitative method (statistics) (Punch, 1998) It is important to work out what works for you and the line of inquiry you have,
'different questions require different methods to answer them' (Punch 1998, p. 19)
My inquiry for example is researching into peoples personal experiences so a qualitative approach would be better for me.

I would like to use the 'triangulation' approach to research when it comes to doing my inquiry, this is the name given to using several tools to examine the same topic. You can therefore compare the data you have received and draw even more conclusions from it.

The types of tools you can use to collect research are;

• Interview
• Survey
• Focus Group
• Pilot Observation
• Literature - (reading other practitioners work)

After reading through Reader 6 about each type of tool I have decided I am going to use the Interview with a bit of focus group thrown in! I find that with focus groups people can bounce off of each others ideas and create either a debate or unity. However with Interviews you tend to get more in depth ideas of that one persons. This i think will help me to gain more focused answers but I would be quite interested to see the additional topics which may arise from a focus group.

With my original inquiry questions (which I have sinced slightly changed) I practiced the on a few close friends from a corporate event agency I am part of, it was great as it sparked emotions of the people I was talking to, they drew from each others experiences in order to answer my questions and I really liked the way it opened up other avenues for me to explore.

SOS on a Sunday Night!

After burying my head in the sand about beginning the planning of my professional enquiry, I decided to try to make some real progress on it tonight,
I thought about the reason I had been avoiding doing it, aside from the usual lack of time I realised that it was because I had no interest in what I was talking about! If I had lost interest in it already now how was I going to be able to talk about it until December!

It was time for a bit of hand holding from Paula, we had a skype conversation this evening which I found to be extremely helpful, Paula helped me to realise what it actually was that I was interested in, i'm not ready to give up the performing side of my career which is all i've ever known and loved to talk about teaching which is going to be my future career and in the grand scheme of it, I know very little about!

For me, at the moment teaching in primary schools is a job where I can use the skills I already have, however my end goal is to work in a senior school or a college, which is why i am doing this course to gain the skills needed to enable me to do this, so it did seem a bit daft to write about a teaching as a professional topic of my choice when it has only just come into my life.

So we have managed to home the subject back in to performing, I was telling Paula how I now am considered to be a retired dancer but I just cant let go of performing, this is what has lead me to the topic of my inquiry, why can't I give it up?

What does performance mean to trained individuals and how have they used it in their lives?

Could this have been a penny drop moment?

A little late in the day and I have a lot of work to do now to steer round my research into my new line of inquiry, I am planning on using the easter holidays as I have a bit more time of work to research some literature on what performance means to individuals.