Something’s Happening was an HEA funded, day long workshop run by NTFs at the Arts University Bournemouth. I was one of 5 NTFs involved and the event was organised by Dr. Kirsten Hardie. Here is what one of the participants said:
“The Cello session run by Laura Ritchie at the Bournemouth NTF conference was a truly exemplary instance of transdisciplinary pedagogy. What was remarkable during the session was the speed with which individuals were able to pick up the basics. This was because the session was wholly experiential. The powerful lesson for me is that we should require that our students become practitioners in their respective subject. This in itself transcends individual disciplinary conventions, and can be adapted for any subject. In addition the session reiterated the value of embodying knowledge – this, of course, is an essential of music, but it should remind us also of the recent work in Neuroscience that informs us that an embodied activity has a very strong chance of becoming a remembered one. The third key point, for me, was the fun that we all had as participants playing and making mistakes. Why can we not transfer these notions wholesale into our own disciplines? Learning is not about producing right answers at all times, it is about failing, and to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, ‘failing better.’”
Dr Nicholas Monk,
National Teaching Fellow,
Assistant Professor,
Deputy Director, IATL,
University of Warwick