Peer Teaching session


One of the tasks we had for Movement Studies, was planning a short session and delivering it to your peers. As my interest this year has been accessing the nervous system, the material I delivered was based on this experiential experience. This was following the interest in integrating the interaction between inner functioning and outer world, two things of which somatic nervous system (receiving, interpreting and responding to the information) and autonomic nervous system (responsible for involuntary, surviving processes) are responsible for. Therefore my intention was experiencing the nervous system as nerve cells, how it fires, and how quickly it travels through the body in order to notice how quickly the information is proceeded and even registered.  Hence I have started from showing short video about the nervous system and neurons, then followed with Body Scanning imagery exercise to bring the focus to the body, then the hands on work followed of cellular touch and finally moved towards a hands on partner graphic of travelling fingers, that I experienced myself before in SRT class 11 and that I found very relevant for this exploration. If I had more time, my further instructions would have lead to slightly more detailed explorations as well as towards little solo dance, involving some music/sound, and even contact improvisation.

It was very beneficial to be able to deliver such material, because I could make evaluations about myself as a teacher. Although it required some research in books (took me quite a few to look at to find the most relevant and beneficial material) and online, it was not too difficult to plan this class, as it was my own interest this whole year, especially second term. Actually, it drew my interest in ways of teaching even more! Even though a number of aspects of teaching had to be considered for this particular session. However, in time of delivery, the time limitation appeared to be tricky, as the material I had is demanding for quite longer amount of time. Therefore the lack of information/details for imagery was noticed. However, details like the correct use of voice, clarity of instructions given, the layout of the material given was complimented by my colleagues. The connection between visual material and practical material was acknowledged working well together, helping to move through material quite swiftly.

Being a participant of other people's 'little classes' helped me not only notice the aspects of given material but critically look at delivering itself, to notice what methods of delivery works better than the others. This included the feedback discussion, as the ethics of feedback is a very important part of teaching skills too.

I think this session was a really good chance to experiment teaching abilities. I hope to be able to deliver this material to another group of people in the future!