Dear fellow Practitioner,
First of all, we would like to congratulate you. If you are reading this document, it is probably because you have decided it is the right moment to become an assistant trainer, having the experience and the motivation to become part of the Feldenkrais educational system. The goal of this letter is to make the whole process easier for you, the applicant, and for us, members of the EuroTab who would assess your application by clarifying both the formal requirements (The guidelines for writing the application) and the general intention behind it.
The Euro Tab, in case you do not know, is a committee of the ETC responsible for maintaining and developing standards of practice within the community. It comprises two trainers, two assistant trainers, and two experienced practitioners. In reading your application, we would look for the expression of your overall practical and theoretical understanding of the Feldenkrais method. Although we are looking for a certain “level” or maturity, the application is by no means a test. We think of it as a learning process through which you can present your professional identity as an experienced Feldenkrais practitioner aspiring to participate in the training of others. As such, it should also serve as an opportunity for you to reflect on the way you have done until now, to observe your working process and procedures with clients, and to assess your weaknesses and strengths. Once you send us the application, we will read it carefully, then we will discuss it among us and vote on it. Sometimes, we would ask for additional information or for elements we might find missing in the presentation of your work.
The information presented in this letter develops and clarifies the guidelines for writing applications. These guidelines, shared by all the other TABs, are a necessary condition for an application and give it a common structure, but they are not enough. In order to be able to get to know you, we will need more than just a checklist of items as an answer to the guidelines. We wish that the guidelines would be used as a tool to enhance and support your development without limiting your expression and creativity.
Writing the application might not be an easy matter, especially if you do not have previous experience in reflecting on your work and presenting it to others. After all, the Feldenkrais work has many aspects that are not easily put into words or that are not so tangible. But whatever writing style you might choose, either analytic, academic, emotional, or by means of storytelling, we think the application should include both a descriptive level, meaning the details of your work, and an integrative level that would give all the details a context and a common thread. Of course, the second part is unnecessary when you only give a list of workshops, for example. But in all the places where your direct experience is presented, we want to see your thinking and self-reflection. In this way, the process of writing an application can also be regarded as a sort of self-assessment process that exposes self-addressed questions that are not always trivial to answer. These questions can help you formulate some general concepts, such as what it means to develop as a practitioner in the direction of becoming an educator of Feldenkrais practitioners.
In the process of writing, especially if English is not your mother tongue, please make sure to have someone other than yourself, preferably a professional, review and proofread the text in order to ensure its clarity and transparency before submission.
Where some elements of the guidelines may not yet be clear to you, we also invite you to enter into conversations with peers and those more experienced, such as assistants and trainers.
The numbers that follow address the numbered articles in the guidelines. Here, we try to provide some additional helpful information for some of these articles:
1.+2. We recommend that you begin your application by introducing yourself and outlining in general your current practice and experience with the Feldenkrais Method. Please include in this introduction the details of the Training Program from which you graduated, including the name of the Training Program and the year of your graduation. These details should also be indicated in your CV. Please also include a scanned copy of your graduation certificate.
3. Documentation of your attendance in Advanced Training: please present this in a table in which the following details are specified: dates of the Advanced Training, name of the teacher, theme or title of the advanced training, and the number of hours (not days). If you have any graduation certificates from advanced trainings, please provide scanned copies. Please ensure not to confuse attendance in a Feldenkrais Professional Training Program with advanced training!
4. Documentation of the Functional Integration lessons you have received: please present this in a table in which the following details are specified: dates, name of practitioner/assistant trainer/trainer who gave you the lesson, and the number of lessons. Please group these lessons according to the status of the practitioner: Trainer, Assistant Trainer, Practitioner.
Please also include a written description of your learning experience regarding receiving Functional Integration lessons. This description may include details from specific lessons or a more general description of what you have learned (recommended page length: 1-3).
5. Please provide a scanned copy of an official letter from a Feldenkrais Guild confirming that you are a registered member.
6. The guidelines in this item (ATMs, FI lessons, workshops, and presentations) are meant to give you a suggestion of what a “substantial practice” might look like. Although these numbers are not required to be met exactly, they reflect the experience accumulated through maintaining a practice.
Please organize the information in tables indicating the dates, places, and hours. The important thing is that we are able to see clearly the (approximate) number of ATM and FI lessons you give each year. No other documentation of this is necessary.
7. This should be represented as a table, including dates, name of the Training Program, and number of days.
8. No further documentation of this point is needed; it has already been included above.
10. We suggest you integrate your answer to this with your answer to article 12. There is no need to repeat the number of FIs, ATMs, workshops, and presentations here; we are looking for a detailed description of your experience, abilities, and skills that would reflect the current state of your practice.
11. Case studies:
We strongly recommend that you write about people with whom you have been working since having decided to write your application. Making that decision and reflecting on the information you need to include in the case study will probably change, to some extent, what you notice during the lessons and how you write up your notes. We also recommend that you get some colleagues, preferably people already working as part of the educational team in trainings, to read your case studies and to offer you their thinking.
A major part of the Case Study is the opportunity to self-reflect and learn from your experience. Therefore, please bear in mind that it is not the successful outcome of the lesson that we regard important but rather the working process and your reflection on it. Your hesitancies, doubts, and uncertainties are all aspects that we sometimes tend to hide but are part of the normal process of learning. By including them, we are invited into the intimacy of your process, and you yourself would be able to examine it more closely.
In writing the case study, please relate to these four aspects:
- Presentation. There is no one correct model to present a case study. You might choose to present a single lesson, a series of lessons, or a few discrete lessons. The important part is getting a whole picture of the work done. In structuring your case study, you are also free to choose among different options such as first, describing the technical aspects of the lesson, and after, your thoughts and reflections or a step-by-step development of the process with your ideas interlaced into it. There are many types of structural presentations, so be creative and find those with which you are comfortable.
- Context. Please describe the general context of the lesson so we have the ability to understand some of your choices. Who is the client, and what made him/her come to you? What is the nature of his/her interaction with you? What first impression did you have? Were any other professionals involved?
- Content. Try to choose the important details and find a balance between the description of what you did regarding movements and the sensations, observations, and reactions you had. Weave into your writing some of the strategies of the method and terminology used to explain such strategies to students. How do you translate what you see/feel of the person into the lesson?
- Communication. Both verbal and non-verbal communication are a fundamental part of our work. What communication strategy have you chosen at any given moment, and what was your reaction to it? These are interesting questions to explain.
In reading the case study, we would like to see the functional/developmental thread of each lesson or of the series of lessons if that is what you present. We are aware that this thread, at times, emerges most clearly while writing or reflecting on a series of lessons; it may be neither clear nor even visible before the writing process.
We suggest that a case study describing one lesson would be limited to 4 pages and that a series of lessons would not exceed six pages.
Please note that articles 12 to 19 do not need further clarification but DO need to be addressed!
We hope you enjoy writing the application and make the best of it.
The EuroTAB members