Thinking about non-positivist as opposed to positivist thought, Embodiment versus Dualism is complex.
I believe that dance is associated with a non-posistivist stance and I feel that I clearly 'know' this through my experience dancing and teaching. I know that there is an interaction between many elements or factors that affect people moving so that there can't be total certainty, or a single version of truth about it, out there.
My emotions, what has happened before I come into the studio, what I ate before class what I learnt in a class last week, last year, 10 years ago, where I am in the room, tension somewhere in my body, the teachers mood, an old injury, will all affect how I experience a tendu today and how I am able to learn or work on that particular skill. Because of all these things it will also be a totally different experience for each individual. And all this applies to my viewpoint if I'm the teacher and not the participant. Through a non-positivist lens (Im trying to see it as a spectrum though) as a teacher I would hope to attend to some of these factors in teaching skills, or movements that will help a student to understand things more fully and have more tools to use develop their own knowledge, of doing a tendu for example. I want my students to work with principles of movement rather then then idea of "this is how it's done".
I'm not sure how my understanding of these concepts today chimes with others understanding, yours and the theorists, but it helps to write about it. The blog is a bit of a testing ground which is great but also a bit scary as others might make comments that reveal to me that my thinking is superficial, narrow or off-base on this.
There are lots of versions of the truth out there including mine. This seems obvious, knowledge is always from an individual perspective, it's how each individual understands something, but I realise it's not so obvious and often raises conflict when my thinking sometimes reveals how I'm looking at certain things in quite a positivist way, especially in terms of this MA study if not perhaps so much in the dance studio.
So in my research, I'm trying to put my idea/s, on the subject out there to share, alongside other people's. And to articulate more clarity for myself about the field of research I'm inquiring into.
The module 2 research proposal is helping me challenge the way I think about research. I'm thinking about ways to match the subject I'm exploring with the methods I choose to explore it and gather data. The methods are hugely important and reflect my stance on everything mentioned above. Its starting to sink in much more, how the way we choose to do things says much about our beliefs and politics. There are so many choices to make about which qualitative frameworks and methods fit best with my stance and the ideas I'm discussing.
I was talking with a friend who has also been studying for an MA, in Psychology, about learning and emotion. It often seems to come up through Skype chats too, and I often leave the conversation with these kinds of thoughts. How new learning, perhaps especially as an adult, often challenges the identities we have constructed for ourselves. The identity of the knowledgable teacher, the pride in our position at work, the way people often link doing a good job with being a good person and the emotions of fear and uncertainty that can result from the struggles and conflicts of new learning.
