3. The IFF Academy model – Feldenkrais Practitioners creating their professional culture

It is interesting to observe and compare how new ideas, movements or new occupations come up and emerge into professional application in response to certain needs. At a certain level of existence and spread (growth) Academies have been founded for instance by unions, churches, political parties, artists etc due to multiple effects: Academies meet the prerequisites to further creativity, networking of colleagues and developing of a professional culture. Academies attract people willing and capable to work on, share and publish best practise projects, sophisticated concepts, research etc.

The Feldenkrais Method has benefited from its historically generated international background. The Method’s potential and capacities to overcome cultural boundaries entered into the IFF and thus into its Academy. Set up in 2001 as a tool for quality and competency development, the Academy is neither a mere brain trust, nor a hierarchically structured brick building. The Academy involves practitioners in a context of cooperation, collegiality and teamwork –modern preconditions of successful organisations and professional performance. The IFF Academy is a participation model to achieve synergetic advantages. It combines global efforts on overarching themes with the diversity of small and beautiful activities on the local floors of the Feldenkrais professional Community.

Examples how the model has been realised

§       A Competency Profile project started globally (research on concepts and theories) and extended to the local level of practitioners enabling its concretion, evaluation and further development as an ongoing task.

§       Local projects, grounded like feet on the floor, start in concrete practice, for instance: within the PRISMA blue project practitioners generate, cluster and generalise Feldenkrais capabilities while doing ATM and FI. So far this local move has involved about 300 practitioners in 7 countries in a global perspective. Within the Skeletonian Harmonists project practitioners improve their anatomy knowledge in conjunction with black magic dance performances and have developed these concepts of anatomy teaching to reach different target groups.

§       An Online Research Journal collects and presents multilingual and multidisciplinary locally done research, now peer reviewed, to the global Internet Community.

Personal experiences

• We very much appreciated the opportunity to integrate within the Academy frame what was originally unified in the person of the Method’s founder but meanwhile has tended to fall away: embodied self-exploration, hands-on and verbal practice, theoretical thinking, broad knowledge, research, oral and written publication, evaluation and notation of practice, reflections on discoveries.
• We experienced practitioners’ creativity, courage and self- confidence arising through the Academy setting.
•  And we were embarrassed on colleagues’ reluctance to share and develop their ideas by opening up Academy projects. Some assumed better market chances by remaining on their own. The PRISM example is proving the contrary.