UoC-The Merging of Dance Classes

I’m creating this petition to voice the concerns of both my peers and I. We are on Musical Theatre Performance and have been made aware of the changes made to our dance classes. As I’m sure you can imagine both third and second year students were shocked and disappointed by this news.

To begin we believe that it will be difficult to carry out classes with fair ability levels. Our teachers are who know us the best and can help decipher what sets to put each pupil. However, the mixture of students from different courses means there is a high likelihood that students will be placed in the wrong set. This could potentially lead to anxiety about the pressure of going to lessons or the dread of being retaught basics that we have already learnt.

Many of my peers have mentioned how the mixture of sets will make them uncomfortable to perform. As you can imagine most students have a stronger discipline to the others. Students whose weakest discipline is dance have spent the last year or two developing and gaining confidence around their peers. A comfortable and safe environment has helped them thrive and challenge themselves. I believe that stripping away all that work will be detrimental to the overall grades of both third and second years.

Questions have been raised about our grading criteria’s. It is well known that the criteria is different between courses. Is it wise to place students in a class who are working towards separate goals? We believe there will be a lack of support and zero sense of unity.

As a third year, we have dedicated the last two years building relationships with our tutors. They understand how we approach challenges, learn new techniques and react in situations. University is to learn and grow in a safe environment. For our final year we’d like to have the best advantage of a good grade using the relationships we have developed over our time at Chichester. We should be focussing on our studies and not rebuilding foundations.

We hope you take our student voice into serious consideration as we understand how important the University values what their students have to say. Thank you for taking the time to listen to our concerns.

Meg Lodge    Contact the author of the petition