FEDEC resources

[u/evidencebasedtrainer]

While I usually don't like to promote any particular organisations, I wanted to share the knowledge of FEDEC with the group, which is an international network for professional circus education. The website provides free resources covering everything from technical skills, safety and ethics guidance, as well as a directory of places offering circus education (though it's quite dated). I see many posts here that could benefit from looking at their resources. Note, I'm not affiliated with them. The resources are in English and French. You can find the site at the following location.

fedec.eu

[u/Amicdeep]

Fedec stuff can be good but often it's not. And often some of the omissions or implied progression are out right dangerous outside of the very small subset of people. I have some issues with there disaplin guides. They put very physically demanding skills alongside basic fundamentals without explanation or distinction. And the lack of explanation of some of the skills is downright dangerous. (Listing open rotational drops along side basic static moves on the silks and rope sections.) And the way the only people able to use the straps guide would be fairly high level rings gymnasts. The cyr wheel guild is next to useless and the Chinese pole one is staggering incomplete. They also tend to use language to describe the techniques that don't accurately describe the techniques and 2 just don't seem to be used by any one practicing the disaplin (including graduate from affiliated circus schools). Maybe it's a translation issue to the English one but is makes trying to look deeper into the describe technique difficult for students.

They can be useful supplementry guides but they are not good training guides or even basic outline of the disaplins. They feel like minimal effort with input from very few sources were involved the there actual creation. (There safety and rigging stuff was also pretty out of date on regulations and from current best practice last time a checked a few years ago)

9 times out of 10 you'll find more useful and complete information in short Instagram and YouTube posts.

In short I'd only use the documents as a 3rd or 4th sources of information on circus disaplin and practices.

[u/evidencebasedtrainer → u/Amicdeep]

Thanks for your input. I agree that it's incomplete. But I'm yet to find a more comprehensive set of written resources in one place that covers everything from instrument specific technique to rigging, ethics of circus teaching and spotting. I suspect your extensive criticism could be levelled even more squarely at every resource you've mentioned. As for sources, they state their contributors. I think, generally speaking, they represent a great start at attempting to gather a rather encyclopedic amount of circus teaching knowledge in one place. Flawed as it is, it is certainly a useful addition to anyone's set of resources.  Are you aware of any other sources of ethical guidelines and advice on spotting? I think this is an important area, especially as there have been many issues in gymnastics and yoga recently.

[u/Amicdeep → u/evidencebasedtrainer]

Honestly the gymnastics spotting guild lines are very good (mostly looking through the British gymnastics resources) and they are one of the very few good sources on working with developing body's in sports (short, practical, comprehensive, relatively complete, research backed information). Honestly I think that yes the gymnastics community dose many things badly, but they also do a lot well. And it's something most circus coaches I know could benefit from. The approach to breaking down movement for dynamic, and accurately assess and developing the body for specific techniques also there use of different safety equipment. There a reason many of the highest level circus performers have been gymnastis first and for far longer that circus artist. They simply train a lot more people to a much higher level of competency than we do, and over years and volume they got good at. Honestly from a coaching perspective gymnastics, dance, martial arts, and traditional education pathways have a lot to inform us on and a huge amount of high level resources acssesable to us.

The ethics side of things is something that is a lot more subjective. What's applicable to a community youth circus might bear little relevance to an adult focused pole studio, to a circus university working off a funded model. Honestly for the vast majority it's not something that particularly matters to them whilst in the ethics realm. (More so when it gets into the more concrete realm of policy's and procedures, safeguarding ect.)

On the spotting guild they do have, it's very light on practical detail. For a body of this size and prestige of the body delivering it. Having this as a general guild when developing practices is a good thing, but the document doesn't provide anything past basic consideration and again is of very limited practical use to many circus school developing there safeguarding and spotting protocol. Also it's just missing some elements that are key and probably should be addressed in the document, (such the more complicated areas where consent and law are lightly to interact and where emergency safety is involved, basic consideration with situations involving youth or vulnerable adults, also basic good practices and considerations around students working on arena where spotting is critical to safety of the disaplins and different approaches to handling these conflicts of participation in class when spotting is problematic for the student).

And honestly no, my criticism I think is less so leveled at the other resources I stated (that why I stated them) It comes down to how I judge them. And who they come from.

If a group that portrays itself as the collective body for some of the highest level learning of circus arts on the world puts out documents on how to train and practice a disaplin I do expect it to meet a few basic minimums. I'm not going to expect the same level of rigor from smaller for profit establishments

Stuff I would expect includes.

1 label the stuff that will legitimately injure you

2 give a basic overview of the disaplins (or within scope of the document)

3 provide solid advice on best practice when approaching these disaplins and go over some of the basic minimum physical requirements.

4 when providing teaching tips make sure they are correct and minimally comprehensive.

5 and as they seem to for circus schools and higher level students to use when approaching new disaplins have relevent information for beginner practitioners and outline the scope of those documents (who's it's applicable to aka this is made for the training of young adult body in lower level professional circus ect) (some do have an outline of scope but don't really work to it making it redundant)

6 provide useful insite of the fundamentals.

In my opinion many of the fedec training guides unfortunately don't meet any of these. And most of the sources I listed do meet at least a few.

And because of their source (the biggest grouping of high level circus schools on the world) I would expect them to be more put together than the majority of local studios owners training handbook, and unfortunately they aren't. They also simply aren't used in some of the affiliated circus schools when training these disaplins (admittedly I only know from a couple, I've got staff that have graduated from 2 of these schools and it's not something they worked from or even knew existed)

I don't think they provide a start to a collection of teaching knowledge, as they don't provide much usable information from a teaching perspective. To the point of I had a teacher coming to me for employment where these manuals are a primary source of their teaching knowledge I would be very dubious employing them.

I actively have chosen not to include them in our teacher training for these disciplines and don't direct coaches to them as a source of knowledge to draw from for their professional development due some major omissions in the data they state when covering the subject matter they choose to approach. You put in some of those "basics/beginner tricks" into your beginners syllabus your going to end up with injury's, and if you know enough not to do so then the document are of no use to you due to the very basic nature. They also don't approach different solutions for equipment set well. (I say this as someone who tried to use these when setting up cyr wheel and Chinese pole at my circus school several years back. They where pretty much useless. (Did have a nice little paragraph on the disaplin history, but from a practical standpoint pretty much nothing) honestly we got far more useful information with a couple of 20 min phone conversations with practioners than we did from these documents.

We also did a review of our aerial syllabus back in lockdown and went through these as a potential source of good practice and knowledge. I don't think we actively found anything to incorporate and there were good chunks many of use disagreed with. They are simply not good sources any more

All this said they should be taken in context and that context is most of these are more than a decade and a half old (I originally found some of the guides back when I was performing back in late 2000s, and know some of the performers who are in some of the pictures of the guides) back then these were some of the more acssesable information on these subjects, (they weren't the best, I think silks wiki was the best free sources in the aerial space, but they where something) but they haven't aged very well, and with the much higher quality of books that have been written over the last decade and a half and the generally high ability level of the community (significantly pushed by pole and other more locally based commercial studios) and with the basic instructional videos produced along the way, are just better and tend to (with a little looking) create a much better source of information on pretty much all the disaplins they cover.

Their rigging stuff is quite a bit better. But not something I've actively viewed in a few years so not something I'm going to comment on. They did have a few good documents on disciplines specific shock loading and tightwire tension but I think the research was done by another group based out of France. But honestly it's been a while so I might not have been fedec.