Name: Kingston University dance and drama student Alison talks about her course
Uploaded: 2014-06-14T12:14:14.000Z
Duration: 5 min 1 s
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To-infinitive

My name is Alison Jackson and I do Dance with Drama at Kingston University. I chose to study

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at Kingston University, number one because of the location; I couldn’t be happier where

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I am, I mean, we’ve got the Thames right next door to us, we can be in central London

in about 25 minutes, there’s nothing better about the location at Kingston University.

The people are so friendly and you have got that freedom if you want to, to go into London

and I’ve got links there with the West End, of course, and I can go and see a show in

My favourite part of my course is how we mix the practical side of things with the theory,

they go hand in hand, there’s never a time on my course where we’re not integrating

both at the same time. Even if I’ve got a seminar which is all theory-based, there

will be a time where we get up out of our chairs and, you know, we’re working our

feet as well and it’s great if you’re like me and you’re a kinaesthetic learner

and you need that, sort of, support. I chose to do a joint honours course because I wanted

to be a more well-rounded performer and I think it’s really important these days,

especially in our climate at the moment to, you know, have transferrable skills and I

think I get that a lot more through doing dance with drama. I’m able to have a lot

more skills and just be a more well-rounded performer really.

I studied drama at my secondary school, I did it for A level, but it is a lot different

from studying it at university. At university you’ve got to be a lot more independent

with your learning, which is just a given with any course, but I still find that it’s

similar in the aspect of having, sort of, to do a play or being a character in a play

and then having to write an essay afterwards explaining, you know, what you were doing

in that play and, sort of, reflecting on your learning processes throughout the play.

We’ve got brilliant resources at the University; the library for one which has got journals

on everything you could need in dance and drama, it’s really good. We’ve even got

DVD’s and videos on past performances and a lot of books, we’ve got a whole section

of the library for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and there’s everything really

you need and if you can’t find anything in the library on the campus where I study,

at Penrhyn Road campus, it’s more than likely that it might be at the Kingston Hill campus

The teaching methods within the Dance and Drama course mean that we don’t have any

written exams whatsoever which is a great selling point I think. It’s more, sort of,

course work based you might say, I mean, we’ll have a practical performance which we’re

marked on and assessed on in terms of technique and how you got to that idea. And then we’ll

have a reflective essay at the end to just join together, again as I said, the practical

aspect with the theoretical aspect, so I think that’s a really good point of my course,

The class time per week is about eleven to twelve hours and we have a really good new

scheme this year which we just started with, which is where we, as soon as you get to University

you start making a log book of all of your achievements so far or anything your teacher’s

given you to work on, anything that, you know, you can improve yourself on as a performer

and we’re able to contact our tutors whenever we like and have a one-on-one contact session

with them where we can just suss out where we’re going or where we want to be or what

needs to be done in order to push ourselves that much further. So we can have a one on

one session with our tutor whenever we like, it’s just organised through email, or if

you prefer you can do it in a group setting in groups of maybe three to four people, so

it’s, we get a lot of support I think and it’s a great new scheme this year.

When I graduate I would love to perform, obviously it’s the big dream, but I think it will

take a long time to get to that stage so I’m thinking at the moment of maybe doing a Masters

at Kingston University, just because I’ve enjoyed the experience I’ve had with the

University so much so far, so I am looking to do a Masters and maybe get a PGCE so I

can teach and specialise in a subject within either dance or drama but I haven’t quite

decided yet. So yeah, that’s a definite possibility for when I graduate.