Professional Artefact

In line with making my work in my inquiry available to fellow Musical Theatre practitioners I have attached a link to my professional artefact below.

https://www.flipsnack.com/ChloeWest/chloe-west-final-bapp-professional-artefact.html

I chose to create a digital guidebook and enjoyed creating it. It's the first time I have created anything like this and I liked the artistic and technological challenge. I would appreciate any feedback for any future similar work I may carry out.

Looking back ... a crazy few weeks!

So this is the start of a new week ... and it's a week without deadlines!! I had my oral presentation last Thursday and now it's the waiting game until we get our results. I presented via Skype due to my current work contract in Spain. I really enjoyed the experience, despite a power cut in the place I was using for wifi right before the session was meant to start!

For any future students who are yet to carry out their presentation I thought I would talk through the process I carried out to prepare, in case it is of any help. With the final deadline for the critical review and professional artefact, the oral presentation can quickly creep up on you. It's important to consider the ten minute time limit early on to save you more work later on trying to cut lots out. I printed out a fresh copy of my review and highlighted what I though were the key points I definitely had to include. I found this useful in making sure the presentation still followed the correct structure despite selecting specific pieces of information.

Next, I spent time looking at examples of presentations and found TED Talks very interesting. They have lots of examples of varying lengths and it was very informative on choices of style and structure to get all your points across whilst keeping the interest of your audience. A common trend I found was the use of light humour, especially at the beginning of the presentation. I found this had the ability to relax an audience and make then interested in who the speaker was and more responsive throughout. A link to the site is below.

https://www.ted.com/talks

To create my presentation I used power point. I chose to create my slides first before wiring my notes to use to present. I found this made the presentation clearer to me and the notes easier to write as a result. Power point was fairly easy to use, anything I wasn't of how to create was quickly sorted by an internet source.

I planned in time to run my presentation several times beforehand. This was useful for feeling the flow of work as well as checking the time. The first time I ran the presentation I was more than 5 minutes over so some trimming was needed! I ran the presentation for a couple of willing volunteers and it was helpful to receive feedback to make sure the content made sense and that my style kept their interest. I did struggle with being slightly wordy, but there was a lot to cover in a short time!

On the day of the presentation I was looking forward to seeing fellow students hard work and getting time to personally explain my own work. I was the only one in my group who presented via Skype. It did feel slightly strange but I had no major connection problems (once the power cut was solved!) and overall enjoyed the experience.

In my next post I plan to attach a link to my artefact so people can see what my work was all about.

A time for collaboration and reflection

It has been a busy few weeks, drawing together all the work I have done so far to produce my critical reflection. Within this time it has been so important to communicate with my peers and tutor. It was initially daunting to produce a piece of writing of that size. Keeping in touch with other students on the course through our blogs, Facebook group and private messages provided great reassurance and confidence. To be able to ask quick questions on structure, direction or complications made the writing process smoother. I have now handed in my draft of the critical reflection and received feedback from my tutor. I was able to arrange a tutorial for the end of last week that proved very useful. As well clearing up a few queries, talking through what I had learnt brought greater clarity to my ideas. I journalled the session and I think this will provide useful in my preparations for the oral presentation.

I am now putting together my professional artefact. This is a process that I am enjoying due to its creative side. I have worked and re-worked my ideas several times and have finalised on producing a digital handbook. I believe this format has the right balance between concept and content. I will be able to include all the relevant information and it will be easily accessible and recognisable to other practitioners in my field of work.

I began by producing a storyboard to create a visual representation of my ideas. This has made producing the handbook more efficient as I have been able to refer back to it at every stage. The storyboard is shown below. My next goal is to send my finished artefact to my tutor and peers for feedback. I will then work on this before the final hand in date next week.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone! It has been a busy weekend, I have been part of a premier of a new Musical Theatre Show with my company as well as lots of work on my critical review and artefact. A focus of my inquiry is teamwork and the importance of building relationships in order to carry out productive rehearsals to produce  a successful performance. A reoccurring aspect of this that has appeared in my literature and several of my interviews has been rewarding hard work and bonding outside of the rehearsal environment.

I took this on board as the Easter weekend approached and purchased Easter eggs for the cast. They were presented with them the morning of their first opening night with the company. It worked well in creating a more relaxed atmosphere, the first night nerves were forgotten for a moment whilst they were presented with their egg! For a short while conversation went from steps and songs to what people's favourite chocolate was. It was a good reliever and the cast went into the next run through in a positive mood ... it also helped that later in the day when sugar levels and energy dropped there was chocolate to snack!

Everyone happily posed with their eggs to share with their family and friends back home .. and of course my BAPP peers!

Critical Thinking

While my work on my inquiry continues I have spent some time focusing on critical thinking so that I am able to present my work in an appropriate manner. Critical thinking involves being active in your approach to learning. You must not just except things as they are given but analyse the information. You must question in order to evaluate and present your findings and ideas.

'Critical thinking is not a matter of accumulating information ... A critical thinker is able to deduce consequence from what they know, they know how to make use of information to solve problems and to seek relevant sources of information to inform themselves' (Joe Law Jonathan Chan, 2004-2017, What is Critcal Thinking?) 

It is important to question the literature you are working with as well as piecing together what is important. A critical thinker must 'understand the logical connections between ideas' and 'identify the relevance and importance of ideas' (Law and Chan).

You must not except that ideas and theories already presented are correct. A critical thinker must be 'looking for possible flaws in the reasoning of evidence, or the way in which the conclusions were drawn'  as well as 'comparing the same issue from the point of view of other theorists and writers' whilst 'checking for hidden assumptions' (Stella Cottrell, 2008, The Study Skills Handbook 3rd ed)

I found some more useful information on www.skillsyouneed.com such as:

Someone with critical thinking skills can:
·         Understand the links between ideas.
·         Determine the importance and relevance of arguments and ideas.
·         Recognise, build and appraise arguments.
·         Identify inconsistencies and errors in reasoning.
·         Approach problems in a consistent and systematic way.
·         Reflect on the justification of their own assumptions, beliefs and values.

The Skills We Need for Critical Thinking

The skills that we need in order to be able to think critically are varied and include observation, analysis, interpretation, reflection, evaluation, inference, explanation, problem solving, and decision making. Specifically we need to be able to:

• ·         Think about a topic or issue in an objective and critical way.
• ·         Identify the different arguments there are in relation to a particular issue.
• ·         Evaluate a point of view to determine how strong or valid it is.
• ·         Recognise any weaknesses or negative points that there are in the evidence or argument.
• ·         Notice what implications there might be behind a statement or argument.
• ·         Provide structured reasoning and support for an argument that we wish to make.

As I continue with my critical review my aim is to not be a passive learner but apply these ideas to constantly question and analyse the literature and data I am working with. I hope this will alow me to present my work in depth, with clear reasoning and without bias.

Appropriate terminology

As I am writing up my review I have been doing some extra research to ensure I am using the correct terminology for every aspect of my inquiry. I have come across a website that I have found informative on terms to use when working with data. It is from the ODI, which stands for the open data institute. A company set up to help with all things data. I wanted to share in case it is of use to anyone else. The link is below.

https://theodi.org/blog/closed-shared-open-data-whats-in-a-name

Chat with Megan 09/04/17

So this morning I was able to catch up with Megan and discuss where we are at with our work. This was reassuring for me as I had to miss the group session this week due to my rehearsal schedule so it was great to touch base and share ideas and feelings on our work.

We started our conversation discussing where we are at with our critical review. Megan is in a similar position as myself in that we have lots of information but are struggling to get it down on paper. The struggle is how to organise our thoughts so that they make sense and cover all that they need to. Megan said that it is important to remember that we know everything about our inquiries because we are the ones carrying it out however the person reading our review needs to understand the basis of the inquiry and also where every idea has come from in order for it to all link together and make sense. She mentioned that she has started to organise her work by writing down the headings of the review and writing notes underneath. I think this is a great idea to enable a well structured piece of writing.

We also touched on the session I missed and the discussions that took place about the professional artefact. We have both taken time to look at previous examples of artefacts on blogs and YouTube and are both considering a video for our own work. I need to brainstorm on the style and structure so that it directly relates to my workplace and review so that it is beneficial to my fellow practitioners. Megan spoke about comments Adesola had made that the artefact is not about displaying what you have found but taking people through the steps of your inquiry. I am struggling with this concept slightly as I feel that by covering the steps of the inquiry I will be displaying the information I have found. Any help or ideas from others will be greatly appreciated!

Megan and I have common ground in our inquiries as I am looking at the rehearsal process for Musical Theatre work and Megan interdisciplinary skills in Musical Theatre production. From this we have both been looking at team work. It was great to share ideas and thoughts and since the chat I have looked over Megan's blogs on team work which were very interesting.

It was a great start to my Sunday's day of work and am looking forward to the progress in my work from the discussions we had.