SEAUS 1 Year 1 Segment 3 Learning Activities
Downloadable file: SEAUS Segment 3 Learning Activities
A large part of the learning activities between segments is to give you the opportunity to further deepen, refine & consolidate your learning & for you to clarify what you understand & what your questions are & what further clarification you need. The activities are intended to further direct your learning process, to keep you actively engaged in your learning, and to link the ideas that were covered in the previous segments.
As in previous segments – you have the opportunity to use the activities to further your learning.
Many of you on first looking at the activities may have a feeling of being overwhelmed, just as in any learning situation. Think back to your experiences of the training – go slowly and quietly, spread your attention, breathe, find the ground – find what’s of interest/curiosity in the activity for you. What do you learn about your process of engaging/disengaging/re-engaging in something that you may experience as pushing your comfort/competence levels?
This process is for YOU – find a way to engage with it that is meaningful and relevant for YOUR learning.
COMPULSORY ACTIVITIES – there are FOUR compulsory activities this segment
1. ATM Teaching
2. Reading from ATM Book
3. Observing TOM in action
4. Learning Journal
FIRST ACTIVITY: ATM Teaching
A. In the Awareness Through Movement book do lesson 6 – Differentiation of Pelvic Movements. Do it several times.
B. Transcribe the lesson to teach to other people.
C. Teach the lesson from your transcribed notes to 1-2 people.
D. Find 1-2 people (whatever suits you) from your group last segment and make up 3 short ATMs in different movement orientations from those explored in the book.
E. Teach these short ATM sequences to a small group of people.
F. Come prepared to share these short ATMs in the next segment.
*********Find below more ideas/questions on how you may go about this process. Use them if they are helpful or find /explore your own ways of doing this activity************
A. In the Awareness Through Movement book do lesson 6 – Differentiation of Pelvic Movements.
Access different ways of doing the lesson – reading it, putting it on tape, having someone read it out to you etc. Which ways enable you to enter more fully into the experience of the lesson?
· How is it different/same to the lessons you did in the last segment?
· How does your sensorimotor experience of the lesson relate to the introduction Feldenkrais gives in the opening paragraph of the lesson?
· How do you think the lesson enables you to identify/experience the ideas he outlines?
· Would you describe your learning in other terms as well?
· What sense of yourself acting in the world does this lesson evoke for you?
· How would you apply this learning in an everyday activity?
B. Return to Lesson 6 from the ATM book -“Differentiation of Pelvic Movements”.
· Recall your experience of doing the lesson – WHAT do you recall?
· Go through the lesson and transcribe it in a way that will be useful for you to teach to other people. This is similar to what you were asked to do in the last learning activities.
· It would be great to continue your discussion in your study groups about how you go about doing this.
C. Teach the lesson from your transcribed notes to 1-2 people.
· How important is it to have already done the lesson to ‘teach’ it?
· What do you observe in how they do the movements/partake in the learning?
· Do you want to clarify any of the instructions or add other instructions to further facilitate their learning?
· What is your experience of ‘teaching’ the lesson – what do you learn differently about the lesson from observing others do it? How do you see their self image in action?
· What did you learn about the use of your voice, timing of the instructions, giving rests, and including the learning attributes to facilitate their learning?
· Ask for feedback at the end from the participants on your teaching of the lesson. It is often easier if you ask them for specific rather than general feedback.
*Remember that the learning is for YOU rather than for them. You are experimenting/exploring developing the attributes of an ATM teacher. Finding what allows YOU to be comfortable in this role.
D. FIND A PARTNER from your group from last segment ie a partner from Melbourne or Sydney segment. Share your experiences up until now. Also feel free to share your experiences with the rest of your learning group.
Could you both, from doing these different approximations of the pelvic clock lesson (from the last segment and from what you have done from the ATM book), make up 3 short ATMs (approx 5 variations) in different positions from those you have already experienced to continue to explore the idea of the pelvic clock and how different orientations allow us different possibilities/affordances of enhancing our self image of these possibilities of movement? Positions you could use would be – different orientations of the head and limbs in the positions you have already done, hands and knees, sitting on a chair, hands and feet, standing – BE INVENTIVE!
E. Teach the 3 short ATMs you designed together to a small group of people.
a) Prepare your teaching notes – what do you include?
b) Could you write a short introduction to preface the ATMs (based on ideas from what Feldenkrais wrote to preface the lessons in the ATM Book) to explain to the participants what they will have the opportunity to explore/learn from doing the lesson?
c) Could you find a functional movement that would be applicable to the lesson that participants could explore before/after the lesson to enhance their learning and allow them to transfer it to an activity of daily living?
Reflection on the lessons:
· How do the different positions influence how people can be engaged in the lesson?
· Is it different when you have to organise to support yourself more in the gravitational field ie your centre of gravity is higher, than when it is lower?
· How is it different to teach a short ATM to a longer one?
· Again ask for some feedback on your presentation of the lesson from the participants.
In the 3 positions you have chosen for your short ATM explorations – how could you facilitate the movements of the person’s pelvis and allow them to explore/find how they can involve more of themselves in their image of these movements.
Include any of the ideas you have explored in any of the segments up till now, and in particular the ideas on SELF USE that you were exploring in the last segment –
· where would you place your hands?
· where would you need to be positioned given the principles of:
o needing to be able to move in the same direction with a similarly free pelvis?
o maintaining the line of force from your pelvis through to your hands?
o your attention able to be oriented to the whole person?
Reflection questions:
· How do the different positions influence your ability to track/lead the movement?
· What do you need to change in terms of timing to allow for the different positions?
· Could you choose one of the categories from the list of TOM, to specifically explore each time?
· How does asking a specific question with your hands, compared to a more general one influence your ability to be engaged in the process
· What feedback do you ask for from your partner about your handling skills that would allow you to make more distinctions about your handling?
· How could you enhance the persons learning experience by directing their attention (both verbally and through touch)? Could they BOTH be useful?
F. Share your experience/s with your partner and be ready to present your short ATM ideas and your experiences of the process together at the next segment.
SECOND ACTIVITY: Reading chapters from ATM Book
My apologies……….this was not followed through from the learning activities last segment.
Please read the following chapters from the ATM book to discuss at the next segment –
1. Structure and function
2. The Direction of Progress
· Find what is interesting for you, what you understood before in your experience, what was new for you, what you have questions about.
· Did anything that you read here cause you to pause, reconsider something, and act in a different way?
THIRD ACTIVITY: Observing TOM in action
· Choose 3 different actions to observe in other people – these can be sporting activities, watching babies learning to move, different people walking, watching someone in a movie or on TV…..whatever takes you fancy.
· Apply the observational categories of TOM – timing, space/orientation, manipulation/body organisation to these activities.
· What do these observational categories add to your ability to observe action/s in others? Are some more useful for you than others, and does this depend on the action being observed? Do you find some easier to make distinctions about than others?
· Are you able to observe ‘better’ action and what are its characterisitics?
Be prepared to share your observations in the next segment.
FOURTH ACTIVITY: Learning Journal
Write a reflection of your learning over the last weeks of 2 to 3 pages.
What we’re interested in is your process – HOW your learning is going & how you direct your learning – it’s really valuable feedback for us & gives you the opportunity, by writing your process down, of bringing the work to another level of ‘understanding’.
*****You do not need to include specific answers to the compulsory activities as these will be covered in the segment.*****
Some ideas of what you could include are:
· what you enjoyed in the learning activities?
· what you struggled with?
· your questions?
· where your questions took you?
· the discoveries you made?
· the relationships you found?
· how your understanding of the ATM process as both a participant & facilitating others is progressing?
· how you see your abilities in the FI activities & what you have learned from doing them?
· what you continue to discover about yourself as a learner?
· what you would like to improve about yourself as a learner?
· your ability to design/implement your own learning activities?
Please email this report to your learning group leader (Stephanie, Zoran, Jenni or me) by October 3rd for the Sydney group and October 18th for the Mebourne group. We’ll be looking forward to reading them.
SOME GENERAL IDEAS TO CONTINUE WITH BETWEEN THE SEGMENTS
A. ATM PRACTICE
Please feel free to develop and continue with your own self-directed learning, especially your personal ATM practice.
Continue to do regular ATM whether by attending ATM classes, listening again to ATMs from the previous segments or listening to CD/tapes that are available. It’s also great to lay on the floor and simply explore and play – develop your own moves and see what emerges!
As I said in previous learning activities – regular ATM at the moment is THE MOST IMPORTANT learning you can be involved in – SIMPLY DO IT. Allow yourself the luxury of entering deeply into your sensorimotor experience and exploring how you both enhance and get in the way of your learning. Remember ATM practice is the hallmark of our continuing learning – entering deeply into the process of ATM to further refine our ability to pay attention, to make distinctions, and to discover/clarify relationships.
Continue to explore your ability to attend to your process under the observational categories that you came up with last segment under the headings of – Timing, Orientation/Space, and Manipulation/Organisation – maybe you could choose to explore a different attribute of TOM from each category each time.
· How do they influence your process, by bringing one element more to the foreground of your attention as you do the ATM?
· How was what you chose applicable to the ATM you were doing? Did it enhance or get in the way of your learning?
B – HANDS ON PRACTICE- this was what you were already exploring last segment. I would really encourage you to continue with this process.
· You have had many more experiences in the last segment of exploring other parts of the skeleton – observing, touching, going along for the ride, looking for relationships/connections, assisting your partner to listen to themselves in action.
· You have explored this in many orientations – lying on the belly and back, side lying, sitting (in different positions), standing.
· You have increased your awareness of your self-use and how this influences the interaction.
· You have done more on the important skill of giving and receiving feedback and determining what is useful feedback?
I encourage you to go back over what you have done in previous segments, and learning activities, to get a sense of how you are progressing, what questions are arising now, and how you can continue to create a learning environment for yourself in what for many of you is still a very new skill.
C – COMMUNICATION WITH YOUR LEARNING GROUP – a wonderful idea that came out of the Reciprocity learning group between segments last time was that they regularly contacted each other with group emails to let others in the group know of their ongoing learning process – their questions, their discoveries, what they were challenged by, and what they found novel ways of exploring.
I would strongly suggest that each group initiates this as a wonderful tool to aid all of your learning. I am sure each of your learning group mentors would be very happy to be involved and to add points for you to consider….the wonderful thing is we are all in this learning journey together, so I love to hear about what you are up to, and to often get another perspective to consider. GO FOR IT! Someone simply needs to start!
Enjoy the learning!
Julie
