Critical Reflection Portfolio

Hi Everyone, here's the link to my Critical Reflection, enjoy reading!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-MxdvnnfLwvLXimWtOxUk5uzZSehQNVycHW3YLPEpSU/edit

"The Healthier Dancer Project" - Literature Review

Literature Review

Dancers’ Health Pilot Scheme article ( Dance UK News Issue 66 Autumn 2007)

http://www.danceuk.org/media/cms_page_media/136/Dancers%27%20Health%20Pilot%20Scheme%20Article%20DUKnews-66-HDP.pdf

Executive Summary of Vision and Pilot (Briefing Paper 1, DCMS Dance Forum- Dance Health 22 January2007)

http://www.danceuk.org/media/cms_page_media/136/Exec%20Summary%20of%20Vision%20and%20Pilot%20Final%20PL.doc

I have been reading over a lot of articles that all relate to the same project “ The Healthier Dancer Programme” which has been publicised by Dance UK magazine and is taking place over the course of the next 2 years.

The articles and reviews relate very well to the inquiry that I am hoping to undertake, which will involve “An exploration of how dancers work through injury and injury prevention from a dancer’s point of view”.

The fact that the inquiry I plan to take on is so topical is really exciting. I’m so relieved that a big organisation is as passionate about this subject as I am.

I shall be watching the Healthier Dancer Programme closely as I am very intrigued as to how it works out and feel that this is exactly what professional dancers need to have the best chance of sustaining their careers for a longer amount of time. If anything I hope that the project will heighten awareness of dance injury to dancers and companies and hopefully provide knowledge into injury prevention especially over cure.

I’m interested in finding out my own data from dancers that I know personally rather than just looking at numbers. I am looking forwards to looking at how some of my colleagues and associates injuries have evolved and their personal experiences so that I can understand from stories rather than numbers.

In a nutshell here is my review from the different articles that I have been reading on “The Healthier Dancer Programme”.

Since 2006 Dance UK have been promoting a national project that aims to help freelance dancers who are not entitled to free specialist medical healthcare to recover from their injuries. The project is a big deal for dancers and promises a twice yearly screening to them for their injuries and free injury care provided by dance specialists. The project is a brilliant idea and will last 2 years providing treatment equivalent to what is already available to elite sports athletes. It is hoped that the project will help to understand the infrastructure that will be needed to set up “hub-sites” around the UK where dancers can go and see specialists such as physiotherapists, nutritionists, doctors, physiologists, and psychologists etc to help treat and prevent injuries.

Finally it has been realised that all dancers need affordable access to specialist treatment and advice, not just those dancers fortunate enough to work in the top two or three dance companies.

The Project will collaborate with the top companies whose dancers already have access to specialist advice and treatment enabling a larger amount of data to be provided and be used to help research into the causes of certain injuries, how they can be treated and prevented in the future.

I feel that it has taken too long for action to be taken towards helping dancers through injury and that elite sports athletes should have funded access to injury specialists and dancers not.

The Healthier Dancer Programme states that the project will “hugely benefit dancers and enable them to push the boundaries of performance to new heights, safely”

Just imagine the new possibilities and what could be achieved by dancers if we knew more about minimising certain risks that could cause injury, or knew more about preventing injury. The standard of dance could improve phenomenally and the limits of performance could be endless. Keeping dancers at their peaks for longer means new skills can be mastered and adapted and that it is worth spending the money on becoming a professional dancer in the first place.

The cost of the project is £500, 000. I am sceptical about where the Healthier Dancer Project is going to get its money from. This is a large amount of money and some of the comments about the project were against it arguing if we can really justify spending this amount of money on researching injury and injury prevention when there are more desperate needs in the world.

I am very excited about the Healthier Dancer Programme, but is there a way that it could be done by spending less money?  

In my opinion we can justify spending money on this cause. So much money is spent on saving lives maybe it’s time that a small amount or money in the overall perspective of what is given to charity every year is spent on researching how to make the most of enjoying the lives we are living. 

Reflecting on the piloted tools 6B

After conducting my research I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to achieve the best results I’m going to have to use more than one of the tools of gathering information.

Conducting surveys is a good idea. I found it the best way to see patterns and trends among specific questions. The down side to conducting surveys is that you obviously only get answers to the questions you ask. What I mean is that you can’t really find out enough about one situation or the reasons behind an answer. I also think that surveys are a bit too impersonal, it’s easy to not quite tell the whole truth and people may be unwilling to fill one in therefore it is difficult to get people to participate. They are however useful to find patterns and problems which could be of use to research into and also useful as evidence of problems.

Interviewing others is a lot more difficult than I had originally thought. I, like many others on the course found it was difficult to keep up with the note taking whilst asking questions. A Dictaphone is a very good idea and would also be useful as evidence for the inquiry.

 Sometimes it was difficult to stick to the questions I originally wanted to ask and I realised that I needed to really plan the questions to get the information off the participant that I truly wanted.

I also found it hard to get a happy medium of formality. If the interview was too formal then the interviewee was less likely to relax into the interview and the information I would then receive from them would be a bit like the survey – they would be unlikely to elaborate on their answers. However, if the interview was too informal then we were more likely to go off at tangents and stray from the questions that I was supposed to be asking and in some cases the candidate may also not take the interview as seriously as I would have perhaps needed them too.

Observations were pleasing in the results. I found that if I was taking part in the situation and not an “onlooker” that I would get the natural results that I would be after and a lot of my questions would be answered as I’d see certain situations happen.

Observations will be a great way for me to gather information for my inquiry as I will already be in a situation with my work where this will be possible while I am taking part in rehearsals.

I have already noticed situations where dancers are at possible risk of injury such as:

•        Not keeping warm in the rehearsal when not being used.
•          Repetition of movements whilst learning choreography.
•          Girls rehearsing in heels for substantial amounts of time.

I have also noticed situations where the risk of injury has been reduced:

•          A full cast warm up takes place everyday
•          Dancers are given a good amount of time to rest between rehearsals.
•          There are enough swings to cover so less pressure to dance through injury.

It would be beneficial if I could also observe other companies in order to compare different company rules and policies. This way I will be able to discover where most of the injury risks lie, if and how different companies do certain things to prevent injuries and what needs to be bought to dancers’ attention in order to help themselves hopefully prevent or work through injury.

Conducting focus groups was quite intimidating. I only managed a couple of people at a time as I really didn’t feel confident enough with more people. I found that the small groups I interviewed flowed quite well although maybe someone with a stronger opinion would lead the other person into agreeing with what they were saying if perhaps they didn’t or didn’t as strongly as they did. I would like to try an online focus group to discuss with different associates who belong to different companies. This will take a lot of planning as there could be issues with time zones and the participants obtaining internet access but would be beneficial to again gather information and compare the different results.

Prior to piloting the different tools of gathering information I was sure that the data I would need to collect for my inquiry would be qualitative as I would need to know details behind injury and personal situations. However through taking surveys and also through reading up on previous literature that has been written about dance injury I have learned how important gathering quantitative data will also be for my inquiry. I hope to compare the results and numbers to inquiries that have taken place in the past. How do my results differ from their findings? Do dancers know more now? Has anything changed? What actions/ technology have been put in to place to help prevent injury for dancers and is it working?

Literature review 2 A Survey of injuries among Broadway Performers

Literature Review

American Journal of Public Health January 1996, Vol.86, No.1

A Survey of injuries among Broadway Performers http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1380366/?tool=pubmed

Although written in 1996 this article was very interesting as it interpreted quantitative data rather than qualitative data.

The researchers surveyed different actors and dancers on Broadway and put the results into many different categories in order to decipher and understand when and why most injuries occur.

The categories are good examples of what I might use to help sort my data for my inquiry. One idea that hadn’t crossed my mind was a Raked stage as I haven’t had to work on one but it provoked a thought that I could possibly consider an extra category for those who work on ships as surely a rough sea is another risk factor for injury.

The article helped me to realise that actually quantitative data could be useful to my findings. I was starting to steer away from using it in my inquiry as I wasn’t sure that I would be able to get as much information out of the patterns and trends as I would through interviewing and observing candidates.

As a staggering number of Broadway performers had sustained injury, and "62% believed their injuries were preventable" it shows the importance of my inquiry. How do performers work through injury? What can be done to prevent these injuries?

Article Review 1: Podiatry Today

 Article Review
 Lisa M. Schoene
 Podiatry today http://www.podiatrytoday.com/article/3468
 What you should know about dance injuries
 Volume 18- issue 1 – January 2005

This article highlights the point that dancers and teachers need to be educated about dance injury. It also stresses the importance of finding injury early to “reduce the risk of damaging or career threatening injuries”.

I agree that dancers and teachers do need to be more educated about injury. In my opinion a lot of dancers go out into the world feeling invincible and don’t take the correct precautions to prevent injury not necessarily because they don’t care but because they don’t realise the difference that taking these precautions can make.

The article also points out that “rehabilitation has become more accepted”, then somewhat contradicts itself by also stating “when they suffer injuries they may seek medical care outside of the company’s medical staff and pay out of pocket in order to conceal injury. Dancers realise that their contract may be scrutinised for past injury and ultimately lead to dismissal.”

This is what I have found so far in my career. People will work through pain simply so they can keep their jobs. If you don’t dance you can’t work and the industry is very unforgiving. There are always people there to fill your shoes. I have also noticed that sometimes the company does not provide the professional healthcare such as physiotherapy or specialists in dance that a working dancer needs. Even if it does the dancer is likely to have to pay for the treatment they receive. It is totally dependent on the company and their policy. But why does this differ throughout the profession?

For example: One of my colleagues trapped her hand in the set during the show. She broke her hand through no fault of her own and was sent home to recover with no sick pay or compensation. There was no treatment or help provided by the company so instead she had to pay out of her own pocket to recover. The article backs up my ideas of inquiry of working through injury as it shows there are many discrepancies of what should and should not be expected of dancers and the pressures of working through injury. It also agrees with my point of there needing to be a greater education about injury and injury prevention among dancers.

What do you think?

Ice or Heat?

Dancers!! Are you fully aware of when to ice and when to heat an injury? I found this article it's pretty simple but explains how injuries should be treated. This is something that as professionals we should know, but do we? Do we put it into pratcice?

Rehearsals Begin

Hey fellow Bappers. Been unable to get online for a week and there are now mounds of new posts on the blogs that I'm trying to keep up with! Just started work here and the difference between this job and my last is unbelievable. It makes such a difference being based in one place and the atmosphere is so different here. I wouldn't say the differences are better or worse, just very different! I would say though, that we have been very well looked after! I am already making observations from the rehearsals and recording them in my journal. The new dancers have been made to feel very welcome here. The cast is around 33. 16 international dancers and 17 (as far as I have counted) Spanish dancers. The show involves classical flamenco dancing and the usual showgirl style, jazz and heel work that I was expecting. All the dancers dance all the styles so it is going to be a challenge to learn some Spanish! Hope all the inquiry plans are coming along well. I have begun to write mine out but discovered I was struggling to find things to talk about. Alan and Paula's blogs have been very helpful in inspiring new ideas for the plan. Ive started to save some links on delicious. Im hoping that if you click the link you will be able to see them? maybe you will find them as useful as I am! http://delicious.com/embren Hope all is going well for everyone Emily x

refining inquiry ideas

It's been so difficult to decide what I want to base my inquiry on. Has anybody else found that they have had so many ideas that have taken them off on so many different tangents?! Starting off with performing and management I began speaking to other people and developing my ideas. I realised that management is something that I would really like to consider toward the end of my dancing carer but it's not relevant to my work right now and there's a lot more that I need and want to learn about the performing side of the dance industry before I move forward down the management route. Getting stuck into the ethics part of the module I discovered how strongly I feel about things being done in the correct way. It made me think over many situations in my life, not just dance that may not have been ethically dealt with in the right way. The fact that so many rules are "unwritten" due to many aspects such as culture, religion and even personal opinions made me want to delve further and further into the subject of ethics alone. I considered inquiring into ethics and how well different companies adhere to their policies and how different their standards and expectations were from one another but this would have been such a broad subject and so controversial. As ethics is a lot to do with people's decisions would the inquiry have been a benefit to performers such as myself? I continued chatting to others and asking questions and I felt my survey helped to pin point other problems. A big (or small if your lucky) part of a dancers life is injury. At some point in your career as a dancer it is likely that you will sustain an injury of some kind. Even the most minor of injuries can cause a lot of frustration. This lead me to my inquiry idea of "Dancers working through injury". What support is available out there for dancers with injury? What can be done to prevent it? What can be done to help cope with it? I feel that ethics will play a great part in the inquiry. Different employers may expect different things. If dancers know what to expect, how to deal with their injury, how to help prevent future injury then I feel this will benefit them a great deal possibly even help to extend their performing life. I also thought that it would be good for me to see from a dancers point of view the support that is needed or expected? What doesn't happen? This will help me in the future on the management side of the industry. Hopefully my inquiry will help me find the best ways to keep my dancers in shape and help them through injury when I need to. Does anyone else feel that they will benefit from this inquiry? I'd like to hear from you

Pilot Survey

Hi everyone so this is my pilot survey if any of you would mind taking a minute to try it out it would be greatly appreciated, thank you http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZJMPFYR  or do it here:

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Discussions

Hi guys, are there any good discussions going on? I really want to get stuck in but there doesn't seem to be a lot happening on linked in, maybe I just can't find it? How are everyone's ideas for inquiry's inquiry plans going?  Get in touch! x