About IMAT

Mission

About IMAT

We train future teachers of the Alexander Technique as well as current teachers looking to further develop their skills and knowledge. Classes are held in Spokane, Washington.

ATI (Alexander Technique International, one of the two major Alexander Technique professional organizations) has instituted a competence-based certification process. (For more information about this, click here.) Our students will decide, in consultation with us, when they feel prepared to enter that process. Success there, rather than completion of a set curriculum or length of training, will qualify them as professional Alexander teachers.

Our classes will be designed to lead to that success. Our approach is firmly based in traditional Alexander teaching procedures, body-mapping, improvisational teaching, group teaching, and the evolving application of principles of energy work to practicing and teaching Alexander's discoveries.

Our students will:

clearly understand and communicate both the historical basis and present thinking about the Alexander Technique;
demonstrate good use themselves in their activities, their lives, and their teaching;
be able to facilitate the primary control in their own students;
identify obstacles students are facing;
and, with a variety of approaches available to them, help their students overcome those obstacles.

The fact that students and teachers alike will be geographically diverse and will all have busy lives may mean that not everyone will be able to attend every session. We expect that a commitment to the program will lead to attendance that is as regular as possible. Students will avail themselves of opportunities for private lessons with the faculty members alone or in small groups, observation of the faculty's teaching, and working with other teachers. The emphasis is on the students turning themselves into teachers, taking responsibility for their own learning and taking advantage of opportunities as they arise. Tuition for the program will be on a per-session basis.

Want more information about what we do? Just click here, fill out the simple form, and we'll put you on our list.

Faculty

Meet our faculty

Bill Conable is the senior Alexander teaching student of Marjorie Barstow, with whom he began working in 1962. He also studied with Frank Jones and Walter Carrington and studies energy healing with James Kepner and Carol De Santo. He is certified at the Advanced Practitioner Level in Nervous System Energy Work. He developed the first university course in the Alexander Technique at the Ohio State University, where he is Professor Emeritus of Music. He is the inventor of the concept of Body Mapping and co-author with Barbara Conable of the influential book How to Learn the Alexander Technique.
Bill teaches classes at Holy Names Music Center in Spokane, WA, and maintains a vigorous private teaching practice as well. He is a teaching member of ATI and a former teaching member of AmSAT. He has taught the Alexander throughout the US and in Japan, Taiwan, Switzerland, and Hungary. He has taught in Alexander teacher training courses in Philadelphia, Kyoto, Nagoya, Tokyo, and Boone and Greensboro, NC. He is President of Alexander Workshops, LLC.

Shawn Copeland, DMA is the Co-Director of Inter-Mountain Alexander Training and the founder of mBODYed, a new hybrid Body Mapping and Alexander Technique Training program for musicians, actors, and dancers. He began studying the Alexander Technique in 1997 while a student at the Brevard Music Center and qualified as a teacher in 2006 after a five-year apprenticeship with Marsha Paludan. Those who have guided his learning and continue to influence his teaching include Sarah Barker, Glenna Batson, Dale Beaver, Bill Conable, Donna Doellinger, and Robin Gilmore. Shawn is Associate Professor of Clarinet and the Alexander Technique in the Lionel Hampton School of Music at the University of Idaho. He also teaches Alexander Technique at the Eastern Music Festival and at the Summer Clarinet Clinic at Stetson University. He travels extensively, presenting at universities and international conferences throughout the US and abroad. Shawn has been studying Nervous System Energy Healing since 2010 and explores the many intersections of energy work and Alexander Technique in his teaching and research. He is a Sponsoring Teacher of Alexander Technique International and a licensed Training Mentor of the Association of Body Mapping Education.

And occasional guest teachers.

Click here now to register!

Schedule

2022-23

September 24
October 15
November 19
December 17
January 14
February 11
March 11
April 8
May 6
June 10