Comments on: Can thinking about dance help us understand how students could learn from experiential education?

By: Facial emotion and the brain – insights from the clinic to Ex. Ed. by The Other Lobe of The Brain

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 03:18:50 +0000

[...] and an advisee of mine outside my field (I was on her undergraduate thesis committee). We wrote a blog post together out of that thesis, and now we are back with another one that also involves non-verbal [...]

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 19 May 2009 03:36:57 +0000

Robin,
Thank you. I find it both heady and satisfying to think with colleagues of all types from students to faculty to staff. That team is just a better way, I have learned, to get it right … and more fun too.
I find a hunger, especially today among our student, to complement the academic content and technical knowledge we cherish with another way of thinking that we have called on a whim the other lobe of the brain and that you stated more powefully when you referred to ” the brain’s emotional need to release creative energy.” We just have to keep figuring out how better to do that in college environment.
-Jim

By: Robin

Robin — Mon, 18 May 2009 16:51:09 +0000

So seductive! Blogging w. my former dean and student on the brain and its function in the stages of creativity, dance, and experiential ed. There’s something to be said regarding links between experiential learning, mentoring, skills mastery, and the art process. A wonderful story of a form of of Japanese architectural production in which one passes through the stages of apprentice, master builder, then teacher, then national treasure, never transgressing the required time it takes to experience the stages of acquiring not only technical skills but spiritual qualities (patience, self reflection, endurance, honesty et al), only later perfecting those skills through a return to the initial emotional energy (passion/spirit, intuition, reason,knowledge) that brought you to that task. Whether channeling creativity into choreography, painting, dance, music, film, drama traditional societies offer key insights into the role of memory capacity-emotional connection w.one’s life experiences and brain’s storage and retrieval of information-in the creative process. How else could a poet recite the lineage of kings extemporaneously for three hrs., or a dancer reproduce dance routines for a performative ritual only presented once every 60 years that are not written down? Everything, down to the cellular level, is always in motion.
We just can’t see(yet) at that level unaided by external devices. Yet the body and the brain are devices with both a material and spiritual dimension.
Exploring the brain’s emotional need to release creative energy is one of the first stages in acknowledging the life of the mind.
My experience is that these capacities/faculties are both intrinsic and socialized as integral to human emotional identity and how we permit the mind/body/spirit to validate ourselves. Yet the stimulus offered by a teacher is not unlike the definition of “guru”-dispeller of darkness. It is exhilarating to see the interplay of teacher and apprentice in this blog!

By: Vanessa

Vanessa — Mon, 04 May 2009 21:29:28 +0000

I think guided/personal experience is the element that you are questioning Jim. Mentoring is definitely a part of this as well as personal worth. You need to value an experience as being worthy to really and truely learn from it, and to develop some kind of emotional reaction. As a social psychologist in training (and I love that I can now say that!), I think it wouldn’t hurt to have everyone take a psych class so they can learn about attribution because that’s also key. You may feel a certain emotion or affective arousal, but mis-attribute it.

By: Jim Stellar

Jim Stellar — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:44:15 +0000

Kristen,
I will let Vanessa speak for herself, but I wanted to flag an important point that you made about the long process of improvement and how a dancer (or really any athlete), knows about that process. The obvious parallel is to the steady growth of a college student over time, especially when academic study is blended with experience. The emerging confidence of someone who has mastered their “field” probably does not reside in the parts of the brain from which academic intelligence operates, but maybe from where emotional intelligence and/or skill learning operates. The question for me is how does an institution optimize that form of growth in a college setting?
-Jim

By: Kristen

Kristen — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:26:42 +0000

Vanessa and Jim! This is marvelous. I have actually wondered what gives dancers the ability to channel their creativity into choreographing.. on many, many occasions. It was mystifying to me because I sure wasn’t capable of doing it!

Until I did.

And it became so much easier after that initial struggle, which involved innumerable hours of practice and collaborating with a peer, to produce something creative. Almost as if I had strengthened the existing connections (I’m very much into synaptic plasticity these days) enough to express this trait or ability of original creative expression, which had yet to manifest itself.
Perhaps this too implies that we, as students and a generation, are capable of cultivating our dreams for the future in nearly any field with the help of experiential education. Although it may be a long and trying process, we simply have to persevere and struggle to learn our trade and the skills it entails in order for our true potential to manifest itself. Although a seemingly basic concept, it’s refreshing to know that we have the ABILITY to change ourselves and our brains (although not completely, folks!) if the drive exists.