Find out more about what to expect from our teacher training course and how it supports your journey to becoming a teacher of our inclusive syllabus, IRIS.
Black line drawing of a dancer lying on the floor flat on their front, facing outwards, with the left arm and leg bent. Yellow grass is sprouting upwards from the ground, filling and reaching above the dancer's body.
After beginning IRIS, our Inclusive Dance Syllabus – we quite quickly realised that our teacher training course would need to be robust. In order to embed 25-years of our experience into future IRIS teachers the training needed to be rich with detail and have plenty of opportunities to practice and reflect.
If you are interested in becoming an IRIS teacher or opening up IRIS sessions at your school or institution you can now train with Stopgap in a series of masterclasses over several months on our course, Seedbed. Seedbed has been developed to equip teachers with the practical knowledge and skills needed to teach inclusively. It supports a teacher’s practice when working with physically diverse dancers, neuro diverse dancers, and dancers who are hard to reach.
Seedbed 2021 is led by Laura Jones from Stopgap Dance Company. As a senior artist and teacher with the company, Laura really understands the needs of teachers who want to make their practice more inclusive. She will be joined throughout the course by experts from the industry from companies such as Wessex Dance and Touchdown Dance. Laura will lead regular sessions supporting our teachers to balance the needs of their diverse groups of dancers whilst taking on the advice of the experts.
After completing the Seedbed training, participants have the option of becoming IRIS teachers by spending a week learning the IRIS syllabus and exchanging with more experienced teachers. From then on, we continue to support our IRIS teachers by organising contact days at least twice a year. Spending time with the company is invaluable in keeping teachers up to date with the latest inclusive training methods used in the studio, to meet other teachers and keep the syllabus progressive, practical and effective.
We believe it is vital to get everyone on board – dancers, parents and carers, institutions, conservatoires, examination boards and teachers – if diverse dancers are going to feel equipped to rightfully challenge for places in the best conservatoires and dance companies.
What is IRIS?
IRIS is an inclusive dance syllabus that gives teachers a framework to develop the disabled dancers of tomorrow. It is a consolidation of Stopgap’s experience of training professional disabled dancers, and it contains tried and tested methods that the company has been developing since 1995.