What is Jwaad Teacher Training

JWAAD initially launched the teacher training course in 1992. Josephine Wise and Maggie Caffrey saw there was a need for teachers to be trained in the discipline of Egyptian dance. It was becoming more popular and many people up and down the country were starting to teach with varying degrees of skill, knowledge & ability. Many knew nothing about anatomy, how to teach a class safely or how they might unintentionally injure someone. Most had very little knowledge of the music, background and culture of this fascinating dance form. Together they designed a course which would give graduates a good knowledge of it’s background, how to teach & help improve the individuals own personal technique. From the first batch of graduates Margaret Krause & Yvette Cowles were asked to join the teacher training team to spread the workload.

The original course was run in 2 parts. You could collect ‘hours’ and once you had 50 hours under your belt, you could apply for the intensive. Some of these hours were specific subjects, others were general technique or interpretation. It was an absolute nightmare to administrate. When you applied to go on the intensive course, your technique was assessed and depending on your own personal level, you were either accepted as a dance leader or dance teacher. No one ever wanted to be a dance leader so this caused some dissatisfaction amongst students – and it also caused confusion elsewhere. No one understood the different levels. People assumed everyone was the same level and this caused some criticism of the diploma.

Maggie Caffrey left the team and Josephine Wise had to review the whole course. She decided that she could not run it in it’s current format and that, for it to work, she would need more people on the team. Kay Taylor, Raphaelle Mason & Trish Rapley Giles were delighted to be asked. Josephine re-wrote the syllabus to last over 18 months with individuals having to sign up for the full course, some of which would take place at existing events, other part at designated times & exclusive to the teacher training students. To remove the confusion of dance leader / dance teacher, it was decided to only run the dance teacher diploma. This meant everyone had to audition and be of intermediate standard before they would be accepted on the course. In this way, the course became easier to administrate and simpler for outsiders to understand. The downside was that it became more expensive & it excluded a large amount of people teaching in the UK. Sometimes for financial reasons, sometimes because their technique was not good enough, sometimes the practicalities of committing to 6 residential weekends / weeks across the 18 month course.

Josephine Wise decided to ask Kay Taylor to become Head of Teacher Training. Kay had already been writing articles on standards in various publications and had canvassed peoples thoughts on what they felt they needed. There seemed to be a large body of people teaching who may have fallen into it by default. They are the only person in their area – or their teacher moved away and they have been left with the class. Many of these women take their responsibility quite seriously and do continue their own development but are also aware they are not qualified to teach dance. Many just teach one or two classes a week and have no desire to do more – but want to know that what they are doing is right / safe.

Kay suggested tweaking the course again. Why not have a foundation course which included the safety / anatomy elements of the course and was open to anyone. This would be a pre-requisite to the main diploma course. It would be open to anyone and obviously be a lot cheaper than signing up to the whole course. It would also have more flexibility and could be run in different parts of the country as there would probably be a larger catchment group that would be interested. It would also give people some idea as to what the whole course would be like and whether they wanted to sign up for the main diploma. Josephine liked the idea and so she & Kay spent several days going through the course and deciding how the new version would work.