Guidelines for the Submission of Candidacy for Certification as
a FELDENKRAIS® Assistant Trainer (EuroTAB version)
Your application for certification will be considered by the Training and Accreditation Board (TAB) upon presentation of the following information. Candidates are expected to be of exemplary reputation and character and in compliance with the Certification requirements, and the Code of Professional Conduct and Standards of Practice of the FELDENKRAIS GUILD® of North America. Applications will be accepted after the five year anniversary of graduation from an accredited FELDENKRAIS Training Program.
Requirements:
1. Graduation from a TAB-accredited FELDENKRAIS Professional Training Program or process.
2. A Minimum of 5 years in professional FELDENKRAIS Practice, in both FI and ATM (as defined in #6). This is the minimum; we expect most people to meet these requirements in a period spanning more than five years.
3. An minimum average of 20 hours per year of advanced training, since graduation.
4. A list of FI lessons received since graduation from a Feldenkrais Method training program:
4.1 a minimum of 5 FI lessons received from Trainers plus a minimum of 10 FI's from Assistant Trainers OR from experienced Feldenkrais Method practitioners (those with 10 years of full time practice). Please write about what you have learned from these lessons.
4.2 a minimum of another 15 FI's received from other Feldenkrais Method practitioners.
5. Membership in an IFF full member guild or FELDENKRAIS professional association. Membership must be maintained to continue your assistant trainer status, once received.
The TABs recognize that individual FELDENKRAIS Method practices may vary greatly in emphasis, content and geographical mobility. We are looking for a clear profile of a substantial practice of the FELDENKRAIS Method and evidence of your readiness to be an assistant trainer. As such, the following two items are recommended, but not required to be followed to the letter:
6. 2 - 3 ATM classes per week for six months per year (60 - 70 hours of ATM instruction per year); this may also include one-to-one ATM instruction.
600 FI lessons per year over a five year period or more.
2 - 3 workshops per year.
5 presentations per year.
7. Attendance in at least one training program other than your own for a minimum of 20 days.
Applications must be in English. Please include the following with your application:
8. Documentation of items 1 - 7 above.
9. A complete curriculum vitae, including knowledge and experience in related areas useful in presenting the FELDENKRAIS Method against a broad and varied background.
10. A complete description of your FELDENKRAIS practice including the number FI and ATM lessons and workshops each year; a description of presentations, lectures and contributions to the local media each year; a discussion of the age groups and types of people you have worked with and the difficulties you have encountered.
11. A presentation of at least three case studies (at least one page for each study) of your work with individuals. Include a description of the thought processes that went into your work.
12. A presentation of your experience with groups, showing your ability to present the FELDENKRAIS Method to a group, demonstrating communication skills and your knowledge of how to create learning experiences (a minimum of one, at least one page in length).
13. A discussion of how you perceive yourself as a teacher and why you want to become an assistant trainer.
14. If you continue to practice or practiced another profession (especially medicine or physical therapy), or if you integrate another method into your FELDENKRAIS practice, please include a full description of how this affects your practice and what influence the other method has in your work.
15. Samples of your advertising.
16. A letter of recommendation from a trainer or assistant trainer who knows your work. This is optional.
17. A fee of 300 Euro (150 Euro, if applying from Israel). Please request bank account details from the office. Please indicate that the payment is for an 'assistant trainer application', and be sure to include your name.
18. Please include documentation of all credentials you use (e.g., MA, Ph.D., RN, Dr.Med., etc.)
19. Send the application to all of the active members of the EuroTAB(EuroTAB Mailing List). Or, you can submit your application as a PDF or MS Word e-mail attachment to <>. Please consult the EuroTAB Office about the size and format of your application. Any files larger than 2 MByte will need to be re-organised. The officecan offer applicants advice about reducing your file size.
EuroTAB, version of May 2nd 2004, modified November 5th 2005, Bank account description modified December 1st 2006.
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The following letter contains information which may be useful to you if you are thinking of applying to the EuroTAB for certification as a Feldenkrais Assistant Trainer.
Dear European (Israeli) Feldenkrais Practitioner,
We often hear questions about what kinds of expectations the EuroTAB has when we read an assistant trainer application. We recently spent a day with our educational consultant, Pieter Mostert, with the goal of refining our description of these expectations to the point where they could be listed in a written form.
Although this may seem to you as though it should be a straightforward process, it turned out not to be self-evident what we should present to the community. This was not the first time a project of this sort had been discussed. In the past, we had had concerns that publishing such a list would lead to a situation where some applicants would use it in essence as a checklist. We did not want the list to be used as a tool which would have tended to limit, rather than enhance or support, the development of the applicant.
The challenge, then, was to formulate each element of the list in such a way that it could lead to further thinking and reflection. To a sort of self-assessment process and hopefully to some questions which were not trivial to answer. Our intention in presenting this list is not only to make our certification process more transparent, but also to offer a tool which begins to ask the question: "What does it mean to develop as a practitioner in the direction of becoming an educator of Feldenkrais practitioners?"
So, where some elements of this list may not yet be clear to you, we invite you to enter into conversations with peers and also with those more experienced than yourself in training situations (experienced assistants and trainers) in finding your own answers. You can be designing new learning situations for yourself--an appropriate stepping stone to taking on the role of assistant trainer, where you will be assisting others in finding their own best learning pathways.
Our EuroTAB List of 7 Basic Expectations
1. The Candidate works and describes working according to the Feldenkrais Method. This can apply to any function and reflects our standards for precision and professional use.
2. The Candidate reflects (describes and thinks) honestly and clearly about their experiences.
3. The Candidate is open to further learning.
4. The Candidate shows maturity and can stand on their own ground.
5. The Candidate shows a variety of experience.
6. The Candidate shows a clear image of what it is to be an Assistant Trainer (shows awareness of their role as an educator--some educational/pedagogical reflection is expected).
7. The Candidate shows appropriate motives for wanting to become an Assistant Trainer.
About the Case Studies
As case studies are important pedagogical tools, clarity is important. We need to be able to reconstruct what happened during the lesson. We need to understand what and why you were doing what you describe as well as how your student was reacting. We also need clear descriptions of your internal processes (perceptions, thought processes).
What did your student say and do? What did you say? What did you see (find)? What were your impressions, and how did these transform into hypotheses for further testing, and then lead to action? What were the functional threads? What were the most important pedagogical elements? What were the important 'decision nodes' or turning points in the lesson, and in the series of lessons? What did you do when a process or processes did not go as you had expected?
We rely on the case studies to give us insights into how an applicant thinks; a case study is a representation of your ways of seeing, thinking, feeling and doing, and gives us important information about what it means for you to create a learning environment using the Feldenkrais Method.
Perhaps it is something like the skill of storytelling. It may not yet be clear to you at first when you sit down to write a case study; but it ought to become clearer as you work which details of the story really make a difference to tell us about and which details do not. Even though some degree of detail is needed, there still needs to be a clear thread which emerges through the "story."
We recommend that you read case studies that have already been published. The IFF Journal, Number 3 (1996), (<>), was exclusively case studies, and case studies often appear in The Feldenkrais Journal of the FGNA (<>), as well as in feldenkraiszeit - Journal für somatisches Lernen, (Erscheinungsweise: jährlich, von Loeper Literaturverlag im Ariadne Buchdienst, Kiefernweg 13, D-76149 Karlsruhe, tel. 07 21 - 70 67 55).
If you are interested in reading more widely, we can suggest the case studies of Oliver Sacks (already popular in the Feldenkrais world), and those of Alexander Luria. Luria's case studies, Sacks suggested, represented a type of "romantic science", in which detailed (scientific) data about an individual are presented by employing strongly novelistic (or narrative) forms.
There are many ways of writing up a case study for publication, many of them good ones, which serve the needs of the author and the publication's audience. But not all of these ways would be good choices for presenting yourself to a TAB as a candidate for assistant trainer certification.
We suggest, then, that you use the case studies which you read to help you think about what kind of style and content is best suited to your individual needs as someone who is engaged in the process of learning to be a educator of Feldenkrais teachers. And how you can use your case studies to produce documents which can be tools for learning.* In other words, please think about the audience for which you are writing and how you would like to present yourself to us.
We strongly recommend that your write about cases involving lessons which you have given since having decided to write your application. Making that decision and reflecting on the information you need to include in the case study will change to some extent what you notice during the lessons and how you write up your notes.
And we recommend that you get some colleagues, people already working as part of the educational team in trainings, to read your case studies and to offer you their thinking. This could also be an productive project for a local study group to do with each other, perhaps also as one focus of an advanced training group--also for those who will never submit an application for assistant trainer certification.
We hope that this information has been useful for you, and look forward to hearing any feedback which you may care to give us.
The EuroTAB
Footnote
* A recent candidate for trainer certification, Livia Calice, wrote the following (somewhat edited version) as part of the introduction to the part of her application which described using a case study for teaching purposes in a training setting. We found that it fit in well with this letter and quote it here with her permission.
Writing to Learn
I learned a great deal in writing about my interactions with this FI student. The model [for the writing] seemed simple enough&emdash;what did I see, what did I do; what did the student do? So much happens simultaneously between practitioner nd client.
I found that the writing of this kind of text poses a kind of translation problem. In abstracting my experience into text, I could see exactly what I understood and could articulate, and what I could not. Writing forced me to rethink and represent aspects of my work&emdash;translating movement, timing, orientation, quality, verbal, and non-verbal interactions from the multidimensional world of lived experience into written discourse.
The usefulness of this kind of text for me was that once I had written it, I could re-read it. On re-reading it, I could see more clearly what I focused on and what I omitted. I could understand better how I worked and how the student learned. I could see clearly in the text how the interactions of the lesson supported the student's sensory-motor learning.
And, I found open questions.
In a community in which we are in the process of establishing supervision and mentoring, it would be useful for new practitioners to have concrete examples of how they work to discuss with their mentors. You need to have gone through a process of self-reflection before you can know what to ask a mentor. For a text to be useful, it doesn't matter what you think about your lesson; what is important is to have a textual rendering of what you have done.
EuroTAB, 11 March 2004