DESCRIBING A CLASS (or this is how it could go - and did)

"Find  a place for standing on the floor. When you arrive there, please do not make any changes to your position. Accept what you chose at first. When you are more aware about your posture there might be something, or a lot that you would like to correct. Please don't do it. Notice how your body wants to correct, to find better balance. With your mind try not to do it. Little by little you notice that your body finds other ways to adapt to the posture. The bodymind finds a new way to survive if you say no to the first one. So there is a change anyways. Awareness makes a change. It makes it easier, no matter how 'uncorrect', 'uncomfortable' or 'weird' your first position was in the beginning. Your bodymind finds a better solution to live with it."

"Pay attention to your breathing. Notice how the breathing finds ways to support and connect the body inside, find integration. You, kind of, can not help the body wisdom happening even if you try, it sneaks in from unconscious."

"With this prolonged position, then let some more movement come to action. Only a little. Listen to the body what it wants to change, and then either follow it or surprise yourself by doing something very different. Notice how your movement makes different kind of paths, travels differently in the body if you follow the first habitual choice or something not so typical. Enjoy the difference and play with it. Let the motivation to explore these two options guide you towards moving and dancing." 

And so on... Towards space, to interaction with others. To observe and to move. In trios, groups of six...You know, this somatic basic stuff: pay attention to this or that and then forget about it. Notice how your uncoscious mind still is working with it. How could the movement be easier, how could you find more freedom, more choices? How to find the full potential, how to speed up, how to keep being curious and motivated by movement, yours and others. The classes are dancing moments with me talking aloud. It is reading the group, individuals in it, reading and playing with the situation.

REFLECTION - DIFFERENT DAYS AS A TEACHER 

While talking and doing that all I wrote above I can feel like this:

1) I am a person, just someone not particularly a dance teacher, being seen by others. What am I doing here? If that happens, it is horrible, but most of the times routine helps. Anyways, I get over it soon after 15 years of teaching.

2) I open my mouth and listen surprised what comes out. Who is that smart person connecting things quickly and clear? She seems to have important things to tell and behaves like a teacher. Not very integrated, but fun. Sometimes I really like my classes.

3) I listen to everybody, see the people or students or who ever there is in class, I bond and receive. I guess that is horizontal teaching. It is great when learning just happens in a dialogue.

4) I teach pedagogy by participating a class led by one of the students, I am being me, forgetting to 'be a teacher', forgetting to take any responsibility about the situation. Just loving to move.

5) In the morning I read something, science, women's magazine, facebook posting. I get inspired, start sweating by thinking, ride a bike to work, teach. Was it my class, or the writer's who inspired me? I also construct something based on something in the class with the students. They have their own inspiration, another article or experience before the class. And then we mix. This is an action filled with many different individual meanings and at the same time we learn together something. There is the level of the individual and the level of the group. Where do I beging as a teacher and where do I end? Do I have material to offer? The learning itself is the material (I hope). Must be constructive learning in a group....I loose the clarity and structure in my writing. Will change to thinking right now.

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THINKING (from the mess in my head)

I think teaching is a field, a state of mind. It is a context and a situation. A possibility to give the students space and tools to create meaning for things. Or find meaning. As a teacher I mostly believe I am neutral. Sure I know that can never be true. Nobody is neutral. I love human nature, it is so complex and simple at the same time. We are what we think we are. I think I need to change from thinking to theory.

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ACTION IN PROCESS (Theory behind)

I believe in process orientation. I started writing and the act of writing changed the way I write. This is a process.

I believe in constructivistic pedagogy. People never erase the past but build on it. Neurology supports this understanding. We can not really forget. We just loose the connection to the storage. With new pathways we might find our ways back. Or elsewhere.

I am a trager practitioner. The Trager Approach is one approach to movement education, created and developed over a period of 65 years by Milton Trager, M.D. There are two aspects of The Trager Approach; one in which the client is passive (tablework) and the other in which the client is active and moves him/herself. "Utilizing gentle, non-intrusive, natural movements, The Trager Approach helps release deep-seated physical and mental patterns and facilitates deep relaxation, increased physical mobility, and mental clarity. These patterns may have developed in response to accidents, illnesses, or any kind of physical or emotional trauma, including the stress of everyday life." http://www.trager.com/approach.html

The main principle is how moving (or else) can be easier. I don't know if I take it easy. But I take it easier than before. As a teenager I was stiff as stone. After studying dance, dance movement therapy and finally trager life is much more fun and I move much more free. Actually getting older - now I am 45 - means in my case getting easier and "better " mover little by little, month by month. I move so much better now than when I was twenty. It makes sence to suck when you are young, then getting older is not loosing skills, but gaining them. Recommend that. Still not exactly a dancer, I mean not more than most of us human beings. But I know quite a lot about developing as a mover. So I think I am a movement facilitator, if that is a word.

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THE PERSON IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS ALL (reflection)

I lost the track. I believe in reflecting  as a method. This is it, writing about and paying attention to what you do, what you think, how you feel and with what kind of an attitude. That you are aware about the others, the context and the situation. That you are smart enough to realise that it is same time reality -if that exists - and also your own truth that has something to do with your history and education.

I have seen some good stuff happen to many students when they start to reflect. They don't identify with their negative thoughts so much. Actually, they can choose with what to identify and be as it is said in social pedagogy "subjects of their own life". And they can feel being alive. I remember studying dance movement therapy. I heard that clients often said " I am alive, I am alive! " It sounded extremly stupid to me those days. I was cynical, intelligent, recovering from eating disorder and other basic human crazyness and was in a bad relationship (I belong to so called generation X, can propably read it through my text, can not help it, one cannot escape the generation. But being aware of it can benefit the growth). So only later I felt alive. And it is huge! I am happy that my teachers let me make jokes of those "I'm alive!" case testimonies. Course those days, I just did not get it yet. My learning was on that phase where it was. I think as a teacher one should not skip any steps. The students come as they are. Just by asking or by demanding they can not be changed to be something else. With support, confronting, appealing etc a lot can be done. Anyhow sometimes it might not look like learning what the students do, but most often they still are. One way or the other. One by moving and another by smoking cigarettes on a break. I once had a student who actually told me she learnt most while smoking on a break. Then her thoughts were integrated. Who am I to object? Sometimes teaching can be very easy...

It looks like I belive in human growth. I believe that everybody has their own truth. But often it is extremely funny how similar the truths are when compared to each other. But I am not supposed to say this aloud. People like to think they are unique. Cynical ha? Or collective with love ;)

Photos: Elina Ikonen, In the photos: Miiamaija Mäntylä