Alys May-James BA Professional Practice Blog

Recently I have been looking into the importance of the arts and being creative. Having been a dance teacher and performer for many years, I believe the arts are extremely important.  These are some of my opinions why: improves confidence improves mobility gives students the freedom to express themselves gives students a sense of belonging or community creates more friendship groups teaches discipline improves communication skills I came across this blog from TedEd. https://blog.ed.ted.com/2018/04/02/why-dance-is-just-as-important-as-math-in-school/ Sir Ken Robinson talks about how creativity is within us all, and we should all have a right to access it and use it. However, many education systems put far more ‘importance’ on subjects such as maths and literacy. What I find interesting is how he talks about how being creative doesn’t have to stay within the arts. You can be creative in any subject. This is so important for children, because curiosity is a key way ...

Recently, I have taken part in my third skype session, but it was my first module one focus skype. It was lovely meeting new people and hearing all the different points they had to make. We started by introducing ourselves and how we describe our practice.  It led onto an interesting thought of ‘How do we define ourselves?’ and ‘What are our identities?’ This went on to talking about our ‘profession.’ Whilst introducing ourselves it became clear that we all had a variety of jobs, including but not limited to, actors, dancers and teachers of the arts. From the introductions it seemed that many of us classed our ‘profession’ as being something in the arts. However, through later discussions, it was revealed many of us have other jobs too, for instance, I cat and dog sit too. Even though many of us have multiple job roles, (maybe due to the nature of the arts industry) some of us still defined our practice as, for instance, a dancer. This got us thinking on the definition of profe...