So I made a video and put it on the website. Truth be told, it was a lot of trouble. I had to collate 370 permission slips in order to videotape kids and post them on the school’s website. I had to get someone to videotape the performance (usually someone without any particular expertise but with a willingness to man the videocam through the whole performance). I had to revideo the classes that included kids without permission to videotape. Then, I had to learn how to use iMovie. And figure out how to put it on the web without Youtube, which has a less-than-educational reputation among my community of parents. And redo our school’s website so there would be a place for the video on it.

Here it is on the school website: The Dance Program.

And here it is at Vimeo:

Clearly, my purpose was to communicate with parents, so there’s only a little snippet of each grade level.  Here are the dances that were in the program:

• Kindergarten: The Shoemaker, which gives 5-year-olds a chance to practice all the basic locomotor skills during rehearsal.
• First grade: The kids were studying weather, so their dances include a song about the colors of weather and an improvisational structure accompanied by weather cinquains they wrote and narrated.
• Second, third & fourth grades: We tried a musical for the first time ever: Character Matters by Bad Wolf Press. We all enjoyed it & I figured out some things I’ll do differently next time!
• Fifth grade, group 1: A dance telling the story of The Magic Fan by Keith Baker, inspired by the kids’ concern about the tsunami in Japan, April 2011.
• Fifth grade, group 2: The kids’ choreography, with a [very] tangential connection to biographies they wrote about role models in American history and culture.

I may do this again someday, so if you have any pointers, do let me know!

In my own corner, which happens to be occupied by the only full-time dance educator in my urban district (that’s me), Dance is now on every elementary report card in the district. For my first 15 years of being a certified dance teacher in a public school, there was one box, labeled “Art.” Teachers would cross out “Art” and write “Dance” — or I always assumed they did. Maybe they didn’t.  Then they would copy a check, a plus, or a minus into the box from the student lists I gave them. No one knew what the symbol referred to: behavior? skill? effort? talent? And I never received feedback indicating that anyone cared.

This year, however, a new electronic report card system has put Dance on the page — or at least on the report cards — all of them, with four Dance-related boxes per child. In 52 of the district’s 57 elementary schools, of course, the dance boxes are marked with “N,” for “not evaluated,” AKA “not taught.” In four schools, grades will be filled in at several grade levels (by my part-time colleagues). And in my school, they’re filled in for each of my 360 kindergarten-5th grade students. That’s 1,440 little electronic boxes, indicating achievement (1 through 4) in three standards unique to each grade level [a blog post from July has details], plus a symbol to show minimal, steady, or significant rate of progress. And comments of up to 1,000 words, where appropriate.

Having never done this before, and working with a system which is only in its first year of review and revision, filling all of these little boxes over the past two weeks took about 12-14 hours, outside of the usual schedule of classes. That’s after school and most of last weekend. I did the kindergarteners three times over, wrestling with the software and the scoring system.  I wonder if I’ll have any feedback indicating that anyone cares?

Meanwhile, a jumble of thoughts haven’t yet come to order in my own mind. Here’s a few…

• There could well be parents all over the district thinking, “Dance? Why doesn’t our school have dance?” I’m OK with that.
• Many of our parents still won’t have any idea what the standards are in dance, because the district hasn’t even finished translating all the academic subjects into all the home languages.
• I did have a moment or two of satisfaction at finally having a way to communicate how inadequately several of my (360) students behave during class.
• If I’m going to have to score my students on these priority standards, I need activities, assessments, and rubrics specifically designed to support the scores. Talk about putting the cart before the horse.
• And how about a curriculum? As we put the structure in place to incorporate Dance as a full-fledged member in education, a K-5 curriculum would be useful. At least as a springboard.
• If we can get the kinks worked out, report cards may be a new way to communicate about the value Dance adds to education.
• I still need to sort out which of the standards we wrote are workable and which aren’t — so we can make recommendations for revisions.
• Gee, I wish there were more full-time dance educators to talk to about this!
• And, most important, how do we continue to ensure that dance class in public education is dance — fun, creativite, expressive, collaborative, and engaging because it’s dance? Can we bring it into the fold, without squishing it into a mold?!

If you have any thoughts on any of this, I’d welcome your feedback or conversation!

ALT/space is a project of the Teaching Artist Journal — an arena for Teaching Artists to share stories of their students, moments of learning, questions and obstacles, reflections, and successes. I’m honored to be part of ALT/space, representing dance education in a public school setting and adding my voice among other arts educators and advocates. Thanks to the folks at TAJ for putting it together!

I hope you’ll check it out… perhaps you’ve read my story before on dancepulse, but some of the other voices have blogs too, so do browse!

There’s also the hope that it might support our profession by collating opinions / experiences in order to gain perspective on next steps…

Participants Needed for Research Study of Teaching Artists in Dance and Theatre

Title of Study:  A Qualitative Study of Teaching Artists in Dance & Theatre

Professional teaching artists in theatre and dance are invited to participate in a research study investigating the experiences and attitudes of arts educators working in urban environments in the U.S., U.K., and Australia. The on-line survey will take approximately 20 minutes to complete. Participants may also be invited to participate in an interview or focus group that asks similar questions. For those participating in an interview or focus group, an additional one to two hours will be necessary. Taking part in this study is voluntary.

Please click on the following link, which will take you to the Zoomerang survey: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22AZ6WW3AAN

Led by Artistic Director Pat Graney & a team of artists & volunteers, the performers worked for 3 months using Michael Jackson & his music as inspiration to dig in the soil of their own lives.  Unearthing the rocks of abuse & abandonment that brought them to incarceration, the program uses hope & the creative process to cultivate confidence, self-acceptance, patience & forgiveness in their place. The culminating performance is a fragile but beautiful blossom, not only for the performers but for the audience fortunate enough to witness the event.

Today is Mother’s Day, and it’s impossible to ignore the fact that most of these women are mothers. Some were abandoned by their own mothers.  All seem acutely aware of their absence from their own children’s lives. As they examine the events in their lives that brought them here, they express the hope that their futures will hold new patterns. As I listened & watched… as the performance plays in my mind today… I can’t help but wonder what we on the outside are doing to help them undo the effects of what was done to them as children & mothers, to help them be the mothers they want to be, to prevent their children from suffering in similar ways.

The voices of these mothers shed new perspective on the lives of one or two of my own students, living with relatives while their own mothers are struggling with addiction or serving time.

On what dance can do for them, if I can do it right…

And on the power of the arts — in both education & transformation.

Thanks to Pat & her team of artists. And to these women, for doing the heavy lifting!

“I just came back from a talk by Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey on the relationship between exercise and learning. His final comment in the presentation, during the question and answer period, was this:  “I think dance is the ultimate best exercise.” [John Ratey, M.D., 10/1/09, Drake Center, Fort Collins, CO]  He indicated that he thought this because dance combines physical with intellectual engagement.”

It’s probably coincidental that John Ratey’s book on the benefits of exercise is called Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. It’s on my to-read list, but meanwhile its title — and John Ratey’s quote about dance as the ultimate exercise — remind me of Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People by Robert & Michele Root-Bernstein.  Sparks of Genius is a book I’ve referenced often while trying to elucidate the kinesthetic intelligence for pre-service teachers in a graduate level summer course I teach.

In Sparks of Genius, the Root-Bernsteins explore the territory of how creative people get & nurture their ideas. By exploring journals, letters, reports & memoirs from eminent thinkers, creators & inventors (the likes of Albert Einstein, Arthur C. Clarke, Pablo Picasso & Helen Keller), the authors identified “a common set of thinking tools at the heart of creative understanding:”  observing, imaging, abstracting, recognizing patterns, forming patterns, analogizing, body thinking, emphathizing, dimensional thinking, modeling, playing, transforming, and synthesizing.  Creative thinkers have their preferred methods from among this list, and each tool can come to life in its own way.  Nonetheless, I have this list posted next to my desk in the classroom because every one of the 13 thinking tools occurs with frequency in a dance class.

• Students observe each other, both as fellow dancers and as an audience.
• While dancing or choreographing, movement flows from images.
• Choreographers abstract reality in order to express it, paring away peripheral details in order to reveal the essence of an idea.
• Dancers recognize patterns in both music & choreography.
• Dancers form patterns while dancing, improvising & choreographing.
• In order to express a concept in dance, a choreographer has to draw analogies between ideas & movement concepts (thus, water is to land as flow is to shape).
• Dancers use body thinking to generate ideas.
• Taking on the posture & movement of a character creates understanding through empathy.
• It takes dimensional thinking to bring ideas to life on bodies.
• A choreographer uses bodies to model & try out ideas.
• It’s clear from the sounds of laughter during dance improvisations that improvisation is play.
• Creating or performing a dance transforms ideas & feelings into experience & visual images.
• A dance synthesizes ideas, feelings, music, social interaction & emotions into a physical experience.

… thoughts sparked by John Ratey’s reported comment that dance is the ultimate best exercise.  And by way of clarifying the depth to which dance combines physical with intellectual engagement. Dance does pack a whollop.