Seven Ways Marj Influenced BodyChance

BodyChance as a school is based on my experience of 50+ years exploring Alexander's Discovery in teaching and everyday life. During that time I trained twice as a teacher. First in London (1976-1980) in a school inspired by the teaching methods of FM Alexander; then a second training with Marjorie Barstow from 1986-1991. Marjorie was the first teacher to qualify from Alexander’s training school in 1933. She taught all her life until passing away in 1996.
Here is a list of seven things I learnt from Marj that I didn’t learn from my English teachers during my Teacher Education in London in the 1970s. I have integrated all these elements into the educational style of BodyChance's ProCourse.

1. Use of Language

Marj reinvented Alexander’s language. Marj was the first teacher I met who had substituted Alexander’s entire vocabulary with a consciously developed selection of her own words. Her exhaustive update was so vast, that many English teachers would travel to Nebraska and be shocked because they never heard the word “inhibition.” One teacher exclaimed to Marj: “But you don’t teach inhibition!” Marj’s rejoinder: “That’s the only thing I teach!”

2. Use of Desire

Marj harnessed the student’s motivation as a guiding factor in her teaching process. She once told me in her living room in Lincoln, Nebraska: “You have to begin where your pupil is thinking.” So she introduced the simple request at the start of every lesson: “What would you like to do today?” And the so-called “activity” model of teaching was born.

3. Use of a One-Step Yes Plans

Marj eliminated the two-step approach that I was trained in by my English teachers: 1. Stop/Inhibit; then 2. Give your directions. One day I noticed that Marj had written in the margin of one of Alexander’s books: “Why take two steps?” Later she told me while teaching: “If my head is going forward and up, haven’t I already inhibited it going back and down?”

4. Use of Group Teaching

Marj innovated group lessons – she demolished the idea that an Alexander Technique lesson had to be one teacher and one student, no more. By the extraordinary results of her workshops, she showed that this was just another prejudicial or fixed idea that had been limiting the evolution of Alexander's discoveries.

5. Use of Touch

Marj used her hands in an entirely different way. She innovated the “touch and talk” style of teaching. Normally, Marj wanted to deliver just the amount of cognitive and sensory information that you could absorb in that lesson. She would tell us: “My words are talking to your thinking, my hands are talking to your sensory mechanism.”

6. Use of Thinking

Marj flipped around the whole teaching pedagogy that Alexander delivered during his lifetime. Put simply: Alexander would use his hands, so through that experience people would come to know the thinking process; Marj would use her ideas, so people would come to use their thinking process to deliver an experience. So simple, but profoundly different.

7. Use of Humour

Finally, Marj made us laugh. Well, of course, everyone does that, but Marj made it a trademarked feature of her work. She deliberately entertained us. She insisted that learning could be fun, that teachers needed some "pep" and you want to make learning fun. She often said, with a twinkle in her eye: “You always move better with a smile.”