Task 4A - First ideas for Inquiry

Having studied Reader 4 and discussed inquiry ideas with my parents, friends and colleagues, it became clear that there were a few topics of interest that strongly appealed to me, specifically; children’s behaviour, effects that performing arts have upon children and whether a degree is more important than experience.

In my job, as a teaching assistant, I never really appreciated that I use work based learning on a daily basis, which is what the BAPP course is all about. I am continually learning on the job and developing new skills through observing the class teacher and adopting and adapting them into my daily routines. I have worked in several schools as well as my old dance school so have built a significant network of practitioners both within the education system and the performance world. This will be helpful when it comes to my inquiry as I have a bank of people from whom I can obtain a variety of responses. Teaching in both a traditional mainstream school and also teaching in dance school gives me an insight to how children behave within both settings. I really want to investigate whether their behaviours different in mainstream school and dance school and why that is? I also want to explore whether performing arts has an effect on the child’s progress and academic performance. Having the connections with many different practitioners will assist me if I went with this line of inquiry.

Attending dance classes and being involved in the performing arts from an early age taught me discipline, time management, memory, social skills and how to be a team player. These are skills that have helped me right through to adulthood and I continue to benefit from them in my professional life now. It would be interesting to investigate, ‘Whether children who partake in performing arts have a different mind-set?’ ‘Does learning these skills at a young age help them, in school, to adhere to the rules and what is expected of them?’ Again, working in a school with a pool of professionals and working in the industry myself will hopefully help me to find more evidence to either support or disprove this idea.

Having taken dance classes since the age of 7, obtained a GCSE and A- Level in Dance and Drama, attended a prestigious theatre school for three years, received a Diploma in Musical theatre and worked in the performance industry. I believed that I would be qualified to teach drama in a non-vocational school, but sadly not! I am considered by many as under qualified because I do not have a degree. I feel that my first-hand knowledge would lend itself to my teaching and I could share my experiences with the pupils. Instead, I would be overlooked in favour of someone with a degree, maybe not even relevant to the subject, therefore deemed ‘Competent’. I would like to investigate this topic further. I am currently deciding whether to teach Drama at primary or secondary level so another question that arose whilst discussing lines of inquiry with my colleagues was 'Does having a performance background provide an advantage when working in a primary school classroom?'. This was a very interesting point and I would love to investigate this further to see the outcome.

Some questions that have come from reading the Reader and areas I’m interested are:

Do performing arts schools and extra-curricular activities promote a different mind-set in children?

Does partaking in Performing arts have a noticeable effect on children’s behaviour and progress? Promote positive behaviour or distract? 

Do children who partake in performing arts behave better in school? Why?

Can having a background in performance be an advantage when working in a primary school classroom?'

Let me know your views and if any of you are thinking of following a similar route for your inquiries.


On a side note, I read an article late last year about how schools are getting so caught up with league tables and stats that we are not educating the child as a whole. I found it to be a really interesting read and they touched on some points about the performing arts and other creative subjects so I thought I'd add it at the bottom of this post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/andrew-fitzmaurice/reject-league-tables_b_8608316.html