Thursday 14th February 2013
HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY
..."students can no longer stay within the comfort zone of one discipline and argue from only this particular discipline’s point of view.” - (Rowland, 2006. Kreber, 2009)
My personal experience at school and college reflects this well. Other students and I often felt as though we were in a ‘bubble’. We were going through the same motions every day with minimal access to the outside world. When in this constant cycle, we didn’t know any different but reflecting back on it now, we were there to train for one discipline only. That is all we learnt, trained for, saw and heard.
I feel that personally, as a student, I was cut off from normality, the ‘real world’ seemed so far away and we (other students and I) would often refer to people outside of our school as ‘normal people’ which to me, says a lot.
I should be really interested to know whether other felt this way or something similar whilst in training and whether you also felt ‘cut off’ or distant from normality/reality.
Schools of the Arts are there to prepare you for the careers and worlds you are hoping to enter. Yes, they do their job well by training up the best artists around but I do feel that they deprive the students of an ordinary upbringing and it is worrying to think how they will behave once they enter the real world, away from what they are so used to.
It is thoughts like this that take me back to previous blogs and the idea that they need to be able to cope with the stresses and strains that come with the discipline. They should have the time to relax their minds and be distracted, have a taste of normality once in a while...
Another reason why I should love to be a therapist/counsellor for Arts students. Whether it be to talk them through their emotions and the mental strains that they are going through, or to simply discuss the latest news headlines!
Again, I must stress that I feel very strongly about this matter (as you can probably tell) but it is something that I would love to help put right to enable a happy, enjoyable experience for all of those going through single discipline training. It is important to be positive during the training years as many can easily lose the motivation and determination to get themselves into a career that they are or were so passionate about.
I just googled and found http://www.improbable.co.uk/project_example.asp?item_id=24 wonder if the key words mentoring and coaching might apply to your line of inquiry?
ReplyDeleteBw
Hi Emily, your blog got me thinking a little further afield to different contracts I have worked. For example when I have worked on cruises there were times when I felt I lost all sense of reality, sometimes not knowing what day it was and definately loosing a grasp of the 'real' world. At times these feeling have made me quite down and out of sorts. In my experience I have had to make myself actively look for information, be that websites or picking up newspapers in ports to get a grip on reality and what is going on in the world. I think it is easy to loose track when we surround ourselves with like minded people. I will be interested to see how you progress with your line of inquiry and what experiences other students have had.
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