Abstract:
JUMP IN(tegrated) Dance (JUMP IN), is an example of project-based action research, set within an environment that aimed to create a new model of teaching and learning using approaches to pedagogy that promote social constructivism. During the four years of the research it was possible to identify and develop a model of practice entitled an in-reaching community of practice. This model embraces the possibilities that social transformation through action and conscientisation (Freire and Faundez 1989), multiple intelligences (Gardner 1983) and learning styles (Kolb 1981) play in order to challenge time-old preconceptions that learning has to follow distinctive disparate designs.
Findings & conclusion:
This new model aimed to challenge assumptions that learning is limited and exclusive to set cohorts, whilst at the same time enabling opportunities to seek new insight into the role of the lecturer, host and learner in a project-based studio environment. The research identified that it also created opportunities for educational sustainable development (Dawe, Jucker and Martin, 2005) as a result of its prevailing orientations in teaching as the model became constructed and applied. As a result of helping to shape this in reaching community as model of practice, many undergraduate students have become less fearful of engaging in the ‘real world’. Community participants in the wider communities have found a fondness for our often closed institutional environment (that is HE) as a result of participating in the project’s activities. Terminology and language is cleaner and more concise and student’s understanding of disability, integration and the nondisabled is informed as a result of real lived experiences as opposed to textbook scenarios and external environment constructs.
