Some Assembly Required: Clearing Imitation

At the start of the new calendar year, I've decided it was time for a change in tack at Solares.

The previous few months had been about getting to grips with the elemental constituents of Caribbean dance:

1. the fundamental relationship of tension and release between clave and pulse;
2. putting rhythmic weight on start of the African rhythm cycle;
3. gaining familiarity with African vocalisation practices; and
4. establishing a vocabulary of individual turn elements - the building blocks of turn combinations.

But as any pedagogue will tell you, "understanding isn't doing". And I wasn't seeing enough doing. This presented as a lack of fluency with the material in its context. In terms of Bloom's psycho-motor domain (below), we weren't even out of the ground floor.

From http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/best/bloom.html. All Rights Acknowledged.

Put another way, the 'Guided Response' of imitation does not indicate learner independence, the 'Mechanism' of manipulation does (see below).

From http://ruyancom125.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/e-learning.html. All Rights Acknowledged.

What this means, is that I have to get Solares attendees to imitate manipulation, for which I'll have to demonstrate the skills of manipulation in context through a series of case studies. And I have just the thing!

Loo Yeo