Building Ballet: developing dance and dancers in ballet

This thesis unpacks a commonly expressed phrase in the dance industry – ‘Teaching dance beyond the steps’ – by exploring teaching practices that develop dance and dancers in children’s ballet lessons. Exploring an area that is commonly practiced and often talked about, but rarely studied, this study shows how ballet education builds particular ways of moving as well as particular behaviours and dispositions deemed desirable in ballet. Enacting Legitimation Code Theory, this thesis undertakes a qualitative case study of children’s Royal Academy of Dance ballet classes through analysis of non-participant, video recorded observations of five consecutive classes at Grade 1 and Intermediate Foundation levels, teacher interviews, follow up observations, and curriculum documents. The LCT dimension of Specialization is used as an organizing framework and distinguishes between teaching that develops dance as epistemic relations, or what is being danced, and teaching that develops dancers as social relations, or who is dancing. The dimension of Semantics is used as an explanatory framework to explore change in both the dance and the dancer at different levels of expertise. Ballet dance is both precise, or highly detailed, and transferable, where steps, technique, musicality and artistry taught in specific exercises manifest in other danced contexts. Tools for analysing epistemological condensation and epistemic-semantic gravity are used to explicate how the teachers build complex, principled, durable ballet movement. When looking at the dancer, axiological-semantic density and axiological-semantic gravity are enacted to elaborate how teachers develop particular valorised actions and behaviours, or externalized ways of acting as a ballet dancer, and how these are subsumed by dispositions, or internalized ways of thinking, feeling and being. The findings in this thesis examine different teaching practices that build knowledge and knowers, dance and dancers, in ballet and how they change at different levels of expertise

Using Semantic Waves to Analyse the Effectiveness of Unplugged Computing Activities

We apply the notion of ‘semantic waves’ from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), a powerful educational framework, to Computer Science Education. We consider two case studies exploring how a simple analysis can help improve learning activities. The case studies focus on unplugged activities used in the context of both teaching school students and teacher continuing professional development. We used a simple method based on LCT to analyse the activities in terms of their ‘semantic profiles’: changes in the context-dependence and complexity of the knowledge being taught.This led to improvements to the activities. We argue that ‘semantic waves’, or moves back and forth between concrete/simpler and abstract/complex knowledge, help show ways that an unplugged activity might be effective or not, and how small changes to the activities can make a difference in potentially offering a more fruitful learning experienc

Smart parking solutions for urban areas

Finding a parking place in a busy city centre is often a frustrating task for many drivers; time and fuel are wasted in the quest for a vacant spot and traffic in the area increases due to the slow moving vehicles circling around. In this paper, we present the results of a survey on the needs of drivers from parking infrastructures from a smart services perspective. As smart parking systems are becoming a necessity in today's urban areas, we discuss the latest trends in parking availability monitoring, parking reservation and dynamic pricing schemes. We also examine how these schemes can be integrated forming technologically advanced parking infrastructures whose aim is to benefit both the drivers and the parking operators alike