A Mini-History of Dance & Flyers
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Warm Up
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A Mini History of Dance Education
DECEMBER 1, 2009, PUBLISHED BY IN DANCE
A
Dance
has been a part of U.S. public education since the early 1900s, when
the concepts of gymnasium and open-air exercise were becoming popular in
Europe. National dances were developed, taught, and situated in the
gymnasium, which emphasized the importance of attending to both the
child’s physical and intellectual development in schools. Around the
time that John Dewey (1), most noted for his education reforms, was advocating curriculum to enhance democracy, Gertrude Colby (2)
developed the “natural dances,” mirroring the return to the Greek ideal
found in contemporary art circles. Popular dancers such as Isadora
Duncan (3) and her protégés emphasized movement founded on the law of natural motion and rhythm.
“The
leaders of this movement went to the Greeks because they had accorded
dance so high a place in the education of youth. From the Greeks, the
leaders learned again the educational value of dance and the need for a
technique which rests upon fundamental, natural principles, and not upon
unnatural body positions.”
B
Many books for teachers were written during this time, such as Caroline Crawford’s (4) Dramatic Games and Dances for Little Children and Agnes and Lucile Marsh’s (5) The Dance in Education.
Such books began with a preface on the importance of educating the
whole child and attending to children’s creative process. Crawford, for
example, suggests that children begin relating, organizing, and
composing their experiences into wholes before mastering complex
symbols. Although she writes with almost prophetic understanding of
children’s artistic development, her book, like the others of the time,
follows the theoretical introduction with a hundred pages of a musical
score and movement games written by adults instructing exactly how the
game or dance should be executed.
C
By the late 1920s science, too, began influencing the dance curriculum. Margaret H’Doubler (6)
began the first teacher training program in dance, centered on an
understanding of the science and rhythmic underpinnings of movement,
which developed into the Wisconsin Idea for Dance. A basketball coach,
H’Doubler attended graduate school for philosophy New York in 1916. Her
supervisor, Blanche Trilling, then chair of the Wisconsin Physical
Education Department, urged her to discover an appropriate dance “worth a
college woman’s time.” H’Doubler, who had studied with Dewey, believed
the future of dance as a democratic art activity rested with our
country’s educational system; she returned to Wisconsin with a theory
for teaching dance conceptually, “a theoretical framework for thinking
about and experiencing dance and a philosophical attitude toward
teaching it as a science and a creative art.”
D
In a call for holism, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze (7)
developed his work in Eurhythmics in the 1920s and ’30s. Adapting
musical study to rhythmic movement exercises or “moving plastic,”
Dalcroze argues, in his book Eurhythmics, Art and Education, for
the use of rhythmic exercises to “break natural patterns” and “strive
for mental and physical equilibrium.” Concentration, relationship to
work, reflex action, and “free play and expansion of imagination and
joy” were the goals of his approach to children’s movement and music.
E
In the 1930s Rudolph Laban (8) combined scientific inquiry with the natural as he wrote extensively about dance education, particularly modern dance. In Modern Educational Dance Laban
makes a case for modern dance over ballet, presents a complete
developmental plan for children dancing from birth through adulthood,
and introduces his seminal work on movement analysis. He offers his 16
Basic Movement Themes concerned with the body in space, with weight;
describes his early effort experiments and the eight basic effort
actions, which have to do with force; and begins describing ways to
think about and observe movement by dividing space into a sphere—the
seed of Labanotation. We creative dance educators owe our understanding
of movement concepts to Laban’s work through his protégé Irmgard
Bartenieff.
F
In
the 1950s, the growing popularity of psychology and its influence on
the educational curriculum heavily impacted dance education. Like their
early childhood contemporaries, dance educators added the development of
self-esteem as a rationale for their work. Individual awareness and
expression were the themes of the decade’s creative dance books, such as
Gladys Andrews’ (9) Creative Rhythmic Movement for Children.
Andrews speaks to the importance of creative dance for the “whole”
child and describes a teaching process resonant with today’s learning
theories, such as constructivism, theories of multiple intelligences,
and critical pedagogy. For example, she describes how teacher and child
learn together through movement experiences. With an advanced degree in
education, Andrews writes of a child-centered curriculum as different
from learning that presumes the child is a “receptacle.” She states,
“[C]ompetent teachers must know and understand children. They must know
why they act the way they do and why individual differences among
children are so important in the educative process.” Andrews not only
describes the child as whole—body, mind, emotions, interrelated and
interactive—but also (like the Reggio Emilia teachers of 1999) includes a
Children’s Bill of Rights in Creative Rhythmic Movement.
G
The
1960s and ’70s were foreshadowed by Andrews’ “open classroom” movement
and the concurrent advent of brain research, informing educators about
the right and left hemispheres of the brain and their independent and
intertwined functions for cognitive development. These two movements
were another manifestation of the combined natural and scientific
rationale used for dance education throughout the century. Dance
educators such Geraldine Dimondstein and Mary Joyce (10) were two
major influences during this time. Dimondstein was verbose,
intellectual, and philosophical, Joyce practical and accessible; both
concerned themselves with defining the elements of dance in language
they believed would speak to the classroom teacher. Their practical,
informative books are still considered essential by most dance educators
today.
H
By 1980, youth had been watching television for three decades and faced problems of increased societal violence as well as the availability of drugs and guns. Children were often left at home to watch TV as parents spent more time at work. In 1980 Barbara Mettler (1907 - 2002) published her Manifesto for Modern Dance (1953) in which she explains that "Dance is a motor art, directed toward satisfying the kinaesthetic sense." (25) In 1980, she published The Nature of Dance as Creative Art Activity through which she explains:
“Dance is an activity which can take many forms and fill many different needs. It can be recreation, entertainment, education, therapy and religion. In its purest and most basic form, dance is art, the art of body movement”.
With the ’80s and ’90s came aerobics and
the fitness craze, which replaced dance and other artistic movement
preferences.
Some
dance curriculum books started replacing the word dance with movement.
These books emphasized the physical, scientific, motor, and kinesthetic,
and provided step-by-step instructions for the teacher to implement
activities without having to understand the conceptual and underlying
principles of dance. Sheila Kogan’s (11) Step by Step: A Complete Movement Education Curriculum from Preschool to 6th Grade offers
a prescription for teaching the movement exercises she developed,
including a script of the first class. The introduction lists three
benefits of a movement program for children: training for children with
motor problems, tools for teaching academic skills, and training for
“normal” children. According to Kogan, “Most children are out of shape.
They are not necessarily fat but they do not have the agility, strength,
or endurance that they could and should have. Most children have weak
stomach muscles, bad posture, and a tendency to stop any activity when
they feel the least bit tired.”
I
In
the 1980s and 1990s, economics and politics had a major impact on both
education and the arts. As conservatives clamored for a back-to-basics
approach to education, the arts became even more marginalized as
extracurricular, not worth funding in that belt-tightening decade. Dance
was considered a frill. The disappearance of art programs furthered the
notion that the arts were superfluous to the more important work to be
accomplished in school. In fact, both arts and education programs lost
funding. As schools became more crowded, classes took over multipurpose
rooms and gymnasiums. Some schools dispensed physical education and
dance teachers.
J
Ironically,
the fields of neuroscience and educational research were reintroducing
the works of Dewey, Piaget, Paolo Freire, and Vygotsky (12) and
reestablishing the social justice themes embedded in the multicultural
and feminist pedagogical frameworks of the ’60s and ’70s. Teacher
education programs focused on child-centered learning such as Bruner’s
spiral curriculum (13), whole-language literacy (14), Howard Gardner’s (15) theory of multiple intelligences, constructivism (16), and liberation pedagogy (17).
The arts, offering multiple symbolic approaches to learning, were
resurging just as the schools were expunging the arts. Dance educator
Sheila Vasquez (18) expressed the paradox: “This conservatism
supports older paradigms of teaching which make distinctions between
talent and intelligence, which compartmentalize learning and create
polarity between body and mind, and which emphasize an elite structure.”
Arts education was then undergoing its own research endeavors. The largest was the Getty study (19),
“Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in America’s Schools,” which
generated a field-wide dialogue about the role of arts in education,
with the most prolific debates about Discipline-Based Arts Education
(DBAE) (20), a topic beyond the scope of this article.
K
Popular dance educators Anne Green-Gilbert and Susan Stinson (21) expanded the early frameworks of Laban and Bartenieff (22)
into dance curriculum grounded in contemporary learning theories, brain
research, and critical pedagogy. Gilbert founded the Creative Dance
Center in Seattle, Washington, and has become an international figure in
brain/body dance for children. Stinson, working out of the University
of North Carolina, continues to push the field forward with provocative,
research-based discourse on the purpose and practice of dance
education. Both worked with professionals within the National Dance
Association (23) and National Dance Education Organization (24) to develop national standards for dance.
This article appeared in the December 2009 issue of In Dance.
Patricia Reedy is the Executive Director of Creativity & Pedagogy at Luna Dance Institute. A lifelong learner, she enjoys sharing her inquiry process with others.
1
John Dewey: America's philosopher of democracy and his importance to education
In Dewey’s model, art isn’t a thing, it’s an experience (though a thing might be the catalyst for the experience.) The work of art isn’t so much the painting or string quartet as it is the experience of the painting or string quartet. That experience depends completely on the social context both of the work’s creation and of its audience. We shouldn’t ask, “what is art?” but rather “when is art?”
Dewey saw art not as something existing separately from everyday life, but as existing on a continuum with mundane pleasures. The Stanford Encyclopedia:
Dewey then argues that we must begin with the aesthetic “in the raw” in order to understand the aesthetic “refined.” To do this we must turn to the events and scenes that interest the man-in-the-street such as the sounds and sights of rushing fire-engines, the grace of a baseball player, and the satisfactions of a housewife. We find then that the aesthetic begins in happy absorption in activity, for example in our fascination with a fire in a hearth as we poke it. Similarly, Dewey holds that an intelligent mechanic who does his work with care is “artistically engaged.” If his product is not aesthetically appealing this probably has more to do with market conditions that encourage low-quality work than with his abilities.
2
3
4
Dramatic Games & Dances For Little Children.
The Dance In Education, Second Edition, By Agnes L. Marsh And Lucile Marsh
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8
Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, LIMS (New York City)
9
Creative Rhythmic Movement for Children by Gladys Andrews
By Geraldine Dimondstein and Mary Joyce
LINK
A Mini History of Dance Education
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Questions
After
reading the article A Mini History of Dance Education and the materials
presented in this post, answer the following questions:
1. According to John Dewey, what was the importance of art in education?
2. What was Gertrude Colby's goal when she developed the natural dances?
3. What was the drawback of Caroline Crawford's dramatic games & dances for little children?
4. What did Margaret H’Doubler believe about dance education?
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FLYER
Assignment
Create a flyer to advertise your dance class. Include the following:
Title of the Class
Name of the school/studio/program
Your name
Credentials
Age group you are teaching
Day and Time it takes place
Contact: Address/ Telephone / Email
Benefits: Why should anybody take your class
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How to Effectively Design and Distribute Event Flyers
7 Effective Ways to Promote Your Classes
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Samples of Students' Work
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