Summer School report: Helen Lewis

ESTA Bursary Report 2021

With thanks to sponsor Hidersine and the Nannie Jamieson Nutshell Fund for supporting my bursary to attend the ESTA Summer School.

The summer school was particularly special to attend this year, having not having been able to attend in-person training opportunities or do orchestral playing during the pandemic. Sharing ideas and teaching experiences with other string teachers, in person was particularly good, having the social contact that I think so many of us have missed. Ensemble playing as part of the sessions and informal playing opportunities with other delegates, was the first time since the start of the pandemic that I had played in any sort of group. This is something I have missed being able to do so much. It’s at the heart of why I play the violin, so it was great to just enjoy making music with others. This was something I had taken for granted as just my way of life pre COVID.

The course gave me time and opportunity to reflect on how I teach and review my curriculum, as well as providing some new ideas to add to my teaching toolkit. I particularly enjoyed Helen Dromey’s sessions on her PHD research and her ideas for promoting the pupil voice in lessons. Helen demonstrated how she had used certain pieces to promote creative learning and enabling students to make choices. The practical group work in the sessions allowed time to explore this further. I have started using some of her strategies in my teaching and can see how using some of her ideas will be really effective. Her sessions have helped me look at some alternative ways into teaching a piece of music and to think about which parts of a piece could enable me to do this effectively.

The daily upper strings sessions with Bojan Cvetreznik were fun and I enjoyed learning folk pieces at a very fast tempo. It certainly kept me on my toes! I learnt a lot from his sessions in how he approaches teaching repertoire from memory to a group of players. It was about playing the chunks you knew and stopping and listening to parts you didn’t and being confident in doing that. This was a very different experience from playing from reading the music and I gained a lot from this way of learning regarding how I learn. Bojan had us experimenting with contact point on each string for the type of playing you are doing before playing the piece, this was a good warm up activity and a good way to check in with your sound. This again will be helpful to encourage my students to do more of. I really enjoyed playing several of the pieces, such as Traktor Kolo and Lapp Lenas Vals. I can see myself using these for ensemble work or as concert repertoire with students, played from memory.

The morning Alexander Techniques were a lovely way to start the day. It set me up feeling relaxed and ready to learn. Henry gave us lots of very practical warm up movement activities that we could use with our students. Many were very similar to moves that I use my in practice of Tai Chi and Qi-Gong, so felt very natural and relatable and will be easy to add into the current warm ups I use for both string and piano students. The sessions also allowed for us to work on our own posture and I have been using his ‘active rest’ audio track since the summer school. I think over time, particularly when life gets stressful and busy during the school term, it will be a gift of non-doing.

Simon Cartledge’s upper strings sessions gave lots of ideas for teaching beginners. As I had attended his online ESTA workshops last year, a lot of the content was repeated, nevertheless it was good to revisit his concepts, many of which I have used in my teaching in the last year.

In my over twenty years of teaching I have really learnt that one size of teaching doesn’t fit all, so having a wide selection of resources and ideas of how to teach the same thing is really important. Also, keeping my ideas fresh and feeling rejuvenated as a teacher is important to me, and this is so aided by attending the ESTA summer school. It may just be hearing the same thing again and revisiting why or why I am not using that approach or idea, or having a completely new way of trying out teaching a certain technique.

Thank you to all the team at ESTA that enabled this year’s summer school to take place, I appreciate it was difficult to run with COVID­­ and a smaller cohort of delegates, but I found it incredibly beneficial to attend.

Helen Lewis, September 2021