Congratulations to Jamie Hawke, who will join the UBC Class of 2021 this fall, with her MA in Kinesiology. Her graduate research combines dance education and dance science by using interpretive methodologies to explore participant experiences. For her master’s thesis, she examined what dance educators experience when helping pre-professional ballet dancers develop their dance skills. With Dr. Shannon Bredin as her supervisor, Jamie is expanding her dance education research to explore knowledge translation in her Ph.D. dissertation that she has now begun.
Jamie started off at UBC and graduated with a BKin in 2016, then pursued a BFA in ballet at the University of Calgary, followed by a graduate degree in ballet at the University of Utah. With an MFA under her belt, she became a dance educator. She states that “it was during my first years of my career as a dance educator that I became interested in how kinesiology related to my teaching practices and decided to return to UBC to study kinesiology once again.” It was while she was a KIN student, that she was introduced to research. And she reflects, “I was inspired by the diverse research interests of the faculty. I knew that the interdisciplinary strengths of UBC KIN would help support me in pursuing research in my own field.”
When asked why kinesiology is so important to her, Jamie stated that “as a dance educator, she could see the direct impacts of research within the dance community and in her own teaching practices.” Globally, dance education and science are thriving subfields that “intersect with, and contribute to, many different disciplines,” especially kinesiology. Jamie has started a PhD in KIN and hopes to help grow these research areas to their full potential and to contribute to the field.
Jamie reflects that KIN’s MA program has been a great learning experience for her, and that “keeping an open mind to different research methodologies has allowed me to ask research questions I had never considered before. I have discovered that remaining flexible with my interests in dance research has introduced me to new learning and research opportunities.”
