Last day of “primera sevillana” workshop

Today we had the last sevillanas workshop of this season.

It has been very nice to have this Saturday workshops where different students have been coming to single lessons to try and learn “la primera sevillana”. Some of them have joined one workshop, some others more than one, some others almost all of them.

Last Saturday we had a special workshop where we also had live music for some part of the lesson. The guitarist Toni Jokiniitty (Toni de María) came to play and sing for us live! The students really enjoyed it!

It has also been very enjoyable for me to see how they have been progressing: some of them were complete beginners and have focused on learning the steps, some others have been learning the steps during this autumn and also started to dance in pairs, some others that have come to more workshops have also been able to focus on learning the arms and hand coordination and perfecting that…

The challenge of these workshops has been that, as they were open to everybody to come to a single one, there have been different levels in the class, from complete beginners every time to students that already know the steps and need to proceed in their learning. One of the reflections linked to this is that even if it is a challenge for me as a teacher and for them as students to be in different stages of learning, in this case "la sevillana”, it can be actually positive. It is very nice for the complete beginners to see the “final result” already in their first workshop, to be able to see  where all those steps will lead to, to see the progress that they will reach at some point, how it is danced in pairs and adding the arms coordination, how it can be danced in faster tempi… It is also a good experience for the dancers who have already been learning it to give advice to the beginners; how they have learned certain things, what kind of tips they use to remember or memorize some steps… their advice and help it is much better than mine because it comes from student to student, from a similar situation or starting point… and for me as a teacher it is always super enriching and important all the questions, feedback and ideas I get from the students, they make me reflect a lot and observe certain details that I have not questioned before, discover new ways of teaching “la sevillana” and observations they make as learners that sometimes I can’t think of, as a person who learned many years ago as a kid what I am now teaching…

The reflection is that, in general, we all learn in different ways and paces and we all also have different backgrounds when it comes to dance, in this case, that also determines how and how fast we can learn something. Always in the classrooms we have a great diversity of students learning in their way and time the same thing… These workshops have been a clear example of this and the learning for me has been that it is possible to have in the same space different stages of learning and we all can benefit. Of course, it is important how many students we have. In these workshops we were small groups, the maximum has been 6 students, so it makes it possible for me as at teacher to be able to observe each of them and try to help as much as I can in their learning process, and teach different things at the same time. This is not possible when we have 26 or more students (I can talk about the sizes of the classrooms in schools in another post). The most advanced students or the ones who have been learning the same thing for a longer time can be the teachers and good examples for the new ones. And the beginners can have an extra motivation seeing where their process or learning can lead to… what would be the result after some time… and are perfect students for the most advanced…

It has been beautiful to see how the students help and teach each other, without me even asking for it, coming from them, how, in a classroom, we are all a community and not only the teacher is teaching, we are all learning from each other!

Thank you for this season of workshops and for all the learning! We continue in Spring!

#mylearningjourney