So… upon reflection, where am I now on the issue?

First, I will continue teaching a sequential, comprehensive dance program, including music. My elementary school has dance instead of music, so I feel a particular responsibility to provide exposure to music, which is not only a soul mate of dance but also a required academic subject.

Second, I can incorporate activities to accommodate the students whose father has expressed discomfort. In this particular case, percussion & voice are more acceptable than instrumental music & melody. Keeping this in mind, I can make a conscious effort to increase the percentage of improvisational & choreographic projects using percussion & poetry instead of instrumental music.

One thing I’m not able to do is invite the dance traditions from these cultures into my dance classroom. It’s a good suggestion, but not applicable in my case because my students’ cultures, from Somalia & Southeast Asia, don’t include dance. As Abdulrahim, a former 5th grader, once wrote in his journal, “My family doesn’t dance so I can’t answer the question [of what kind of dances my family does]. It is because it’s against the muslim thing. My family doesn’t dance or never will dance. So that’s all I have to say.”

I am fairly committed to forestalling the day when students or families opt their children out of dance class, although it may be inevitable. About 10% of my students belong to communities that look askance at music & dance to varying degrees. If one family opts out, the problem may expand exponentially with other families joining the exodus. In my 15 years of teaching in this school, I’ve been lucky that this is the first outright request. So long as all students in the school are included in the program, I’m able to build an all-school dance culture, nurturing social & collaborative skills that really contribute to our community.

And I’ll continue to communicate with parents over the long-term, face-to-face and on a wider scale. I would guess that one of the reasons that families choose my school is that it’s a delightful community where children from many places in the world get along well together, which is perhaps partially due to habits our children develop by learning & playing together in dance. This, despite the diversity of our population: Our 98118 zip code was reported at one time as being the most diverse in the nation. This point is one I can continue trying to articulate to parents, as I did in placing a video on our website, specifically for the purpose of explaining the dance program to current & prospective parents. So in conferences & in the community, I can redouble my efforts to communicate.

For now, I’m just grateful that I had other educators with whom to communicate, in order to clarify my thoughts and find a way forward…

It’s such a pleasure to dance with these girls. They dance as if they love it, and they offer so much to their classmates, as we develop movement skills, learn cultural dances from around the world, and choreograph dances to express ideas and feelings from the classroom. They thrive in this public school classroom, where dance as a fine art qualifies as one of the required content areas for a model education.

But I feel such sadness as I look ahead, because they’re bound to experience tremendous conflict in my classroom. Although they’ll remain their friendly selves outside my class, open & enthusiastic in their greetings, their presence inside the classroom will change: movements restrained, participation reserved, and expressions guarded or even sullen.

Last month, their father contacted me with a request to remove them from dance class. Although my school has families for whom dance is not acceptable, that was not the main issue in this case. In this case, his note cited religious restrictions on cross-gender contact (especially touching) and listening to music. He asked to have them placed somewhere else during dance class.

There are several things he didn’t realize. First, within a public school, there’s no surplus of adults to supervise children who want to be somewhere else. And second, given research suggesting that music and dance support academic achievement in positive ways, you can’t escape music by moving from one location to another in a public school. Every teacher is encouraged to integrate the arts!

We met & talked, Dad, myself, the girls’ teachers, the principal. I can — and d0 — offer alternatives to cross-gender contact. I teach that anyone can be your learning partner, in dance as well as science, reading, or math. But we explore ways of being connected without touch, as you would in science, reading, or math. Picture two partners facing each other, with hands palm-to-palm — not touching but with a 2″ cushion of space between the palms. Students can do space-between elbow swings, space-between leading and following, space-between turns.

But music! How can you take music out of dance class? …when all the children love it?  In deference to families that feel the conflict between their traditions and the society in which they find themselves living, I already limit our musical repertoire: instrumental selections that offer rhythmic variety, clear listening cues, and lyrics chosen to support educational concepts and content. But music & dance are interwoven, through energy, accuracy, synchronicity & just plain fun.

So we’re stuck, I with my experience of what music can offer, and the girls with their developing awareness of how music is viewed at home. I with my vision of how the girls will be affected over the years to come, and the girls, as yet unaware of how life in two cultures will feel.

If you have a clue that will help me teach these beautiful children, please share your ideas!

*Of course, I changed their names for this article, choosing names to fit the personalities I know: Alimah means “dancer or musician,” and Farihah means “joyful, happy, cheerful, and glad.”

Anyway, I wanted to share. Not the best videos but perhaps you can get an idea of the dancing…

Traditional Dances / Panama from Meg Mahoney on Vimeo.

Las Tinajas Restaurant in Panama City does a great job of staging traditional Panamanian dances.

The Colonial Williamsburg website has a rich resource teacher site.
from Eileen Sheehan, Illinois

“Colonial Singing Games and Dances,” produced by the Williamsburg Foundation, has dances which are notated and easy to follow.
from Elly Porter, Washington, DC

In addition to Colonial Singing Games and Dances and White Mountain Reel [which seems to be out of print], one should know about Chip Hendrickson‘s book, Colonial Social Dancing for Children:
from Jacob Bloom, Massachusetts, a friend of NDEO member Erica Sigal, Massachusetts

Colonial Social Dancing for Children by Charles C. Hendrickson
Contact the Hendrickson group in Connecticut
Also, Williamsburg’s foundation is a wonderful resource.
from Suzanne E. Henneman, Maryland

“Early American Roots,” a CD from the Smithsonian, includes 22 short musical pieces from Colonial America. From Hesperus, a contact address is:  Maggie’s Music, PO Box 490, Shady Side, MD20764, phone 410-867-0642.  The publisher might have information about the dances done to pieces on the recording.
from Rima Faber, Maryland

Colonists would have been Englishmen and Scots primarily. Their dances were likely the dances they brought with them; round dances and country dances would give you a wealth of ideas, using circles, weaving, and partner exchanges. The steps are comprised of slip steps (chasses moving sideways), retire skips (forward or backward), skip change of step (hop step step step) and setting step (usually a pas de basques danced tightly as if doing the “pony” from the 60s). Your courtesies, based on the manners of the time, include bows from the men and “acknowledgements” from the ladies. A simple allemande is also appropriate and can be done in much the same fashion as we saw in the 70s on Soul Train…just far more refined!
A good general reference to have on hand if you are working with dance in the context of social or geographic influences is
Dance A While: Handbook for Folk, Square, Contra and Social Dance
by Jane Harris, Anne Pittman, Marlys Waller, Cathy Dark, 8^th edition published in 2000 by Allyn and Bacon.
from Kathryn Austin, Florida

The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian have tons of online resources.
Try YouTube — look for the NY Baroque Ensemble and/or the Colonial Williamsburg VA dancers.
from Karen Bradley, Washington D.C.

The Library of Congress website may have some video clips of dances from that period. It’s a great site but you’ll have to kind of work your way through it to see if it has anything relevant.  From the site: “To form an idea of the type of dance that was performed during the American colonial period, see the essays on baroque and late eighteenth-century social dance in the special presentation on the history of dance accompanying An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction Manuals, ca. 1490-1920.”
Another nice site:  www.americanrevolution.org/dance.html
The Society of Dance History Scholars has a really nice site as well; check out the “Colonial Dancing Master” in particular.
AND remember the Virginia Reel was supposedly Georgre Washington’s favorite dance.
from Shana Habel, California

For European-based Colonial American Dance I highly recommend the book / CD entitled Chimes of Dunkirk: Great Dances for Children, available from New England Dancing Masters at 41 West Street in Brattleboro, Vermont 05301.
For African American dances of the Colonial period, including Juba and the Ring Shout, I have always reached out to my NYC colleagues who are experts in this area such as Mickey Davidson. There is some excellent footage of early African American dance in the Channel 13 Dancing series, volume 5, ‘New Worlds, New Forms.’
from Sandra Stratton-Gonzalez, New York

The New England Dancing Masters have a wonderful series of line, contra, and square dances that could be pared down to be more authentic for Colonial Dance.  White Mountain Reel also has a collection with 2 pieces that use sparse instrumentation, more authentic to the Colonial period.
from Laurel Lesio-Eisenstadt, New York

**This list is compiled from the NDEO K-12 Special Interest Forum. NDEO (National Dance Education Organization) has a set of email forums for special interest groups within the field, where NDEO members exchange ideas. Folks not belonging to NDEO who are interested in this or any other topic on dance education should consider joining NDEO and the online discussion! Current members can get discounted prices, if they use user name & password, to order resources from the online store.

No wonder it’s such a great place to work!

We learned it yesterday, but today after we warmed up with yoga, I wanted everyone to have a chance to be the head couple.  So they reeled for 20 minutes, and when everyone had had a turn, our time was up!  There wasn’t a single complaint — just tired, happy kids!

Tomorrow we start Part 3 — their own choreography using clapping & body percussion. And for performance, of course, we’ll only do the reel a couple times through.

Join the discussion about Why Dance Matters here & here.

As I brought up my lesson plan template for planning this coming week’s classes, I realized why the coming weeks (and months) have been looming large in my mind.  Starting Tuesday (tomorrow I’ll be teaching a day of sessions for pre-service teachers at Seattle University), I’ll be planning 8 unique classes every day instead of 5 because every class has to have their own performance piece.  Man, this year’s schedule is a killer!

So far this year my lesson plan template looks like this:

Classes for kinder/1st, 2nd-3rd, 4th, 5th & Autism

…with 5 discreet classes per day (K-1, 2-3, 4, 5 & autism). But from now on, every class will be working on a unique piece, so I needed to split 3 columns in order to make an 8-plan template.  They’re not all planned yet for Tuesday!

Once I get the pieces started, they’ll each unfold pretty organically, with the next step proceeding from the last step.  So I can look forward to that. But here’s the lesson plan template for Tuesday at this point:

We just have to get started...!

And here’s the performance plan, still evolving — I’ll try a few things with the 2nd graders (B) & see what works best.

There are still some holes, but it's beginning to firm up.

Anyway, vacation’s over so here we go…!

When I was growing up, holiday projects at school heightened my anticipation of Christmas.  We sang carols, performed a Christmas play, created wreaths, Santa Clauses, stockings & Christmas trees…  Christmas imagery overwhelmed, despite a thriving Jewish community in the region. My first teaching job echoed the atmosphere of my childhood, with a single Hanukkah song representing diversity among the carols.

But now, diversity is a defining thread among my students. Many students celebrate Christmas; some also honor Kwanza.  The New Year might be the most universally celebrated holiday among students, but it’s confusing to keep track of when to celebrate it!  Although many probably enjoy the Gregorian New Year (January 1) as an occasion to party, my students’ celebrations — including excitement, candy, gift envelopes, and lion & dragon dancing — stretch from January through February.

The Chinese New Year or Lunar New Year occurs at the new moon of the first lunar month, somewhere between January 21 & February 21 (Feb 14 in 2010).  The Vietnamese New Year, or Tet Nguyen Dan, largely follows the Chinese calendar [except on a few confusing occasions, like the year 2007]; but in Seattle, Tet in Seattle involves a two-day extravaganza on some date near the Chinese New Year — February 6-7 in 2010. Evidently, the Lao New Year, or Bpee Mai, & Cambodian New Year, or Chol Chnom Thmey, occur from April 13 to April 15 as harvest celebrations (think southern hemisphere), but it’s the Lu-Mien New Year to which my students often invite me — it probably occurs on the Saturday before the Chinese New Year, but I never know til I hear from students. I do love the dancing, both traditional & up-t0-date:

• Traditional Mien dance, 2009
• Keeping it current at the Mien New Year, 2009

Meanwhile, among my Muslim students, their most important holidays seem to fall in September-October & December & are highlighted by excitement [again], extra prayers, fasting & henna-painted hands.

So as a teacher in a public school, I don’t much touch holidays.  I could try to teach about them all, but chances are, I’d miss someone. I could try to teach the ones that go with the seasons (celebrating light in winter, or the abundance of harvest…), but the dates for those change with the hemisphere.  I’ve even had occasion to become cautious about using the word “celebration,” since I’ve had children who had to go sit in the library during anything labeled as such.

If I were a classroom teacher again, I’d go with students reporting to each other about their favorite annual holiday or their reasons for not celebrating. But as a dance educator with limited contact time, I go with festive, in the merry & joyous sense of the word.  Festive includes dances & dance-stories that are unrelated to any particular holiday or belief, but bring smiles to everyone’s face.  We do them the day — or week — before a vacation, as a way to celebrate — whoops! rejoice or observe our happiness — at the upcoming days at home with our families. Everyone’s facial expressions are characterized by an upturning of the corners of the mouth, and no one has to go sit in the library alone.

To anyone who visits this site:
Please be merry & have a Happy New Year, whenever.