7.8: Aesthetic, Creative, Intellectual, and Cultural

Dance teachers are responsible for robust education of their students. Using the four cornerstones of dance education, dancing and performing is aesthetic whereas allowing students in class to experiment with creating movement and choreographed sequences is creative. Intellectual expectations should also engage higher order thinking (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) where students might be asked to analyze and critique in class, video viewing, or concerts… and finally, the cultural is teaching dance history. Students can connect culture to a dance’s context.

Teaching dance technique alone is not a solid pedagogical approach to produce an educated student of dance. Dance education requires contextual coherence, meaning dance must be framed in a way that makes it relevant to society. If we are to access that final level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, dance instruction must aim for inquiry based instructional methodology where classes are both participatory as well as investigative (McCutchen, 2006). The full spectrum of dance as a discipline, looks at dance from current contemporaneous times, as well as dances from the past. Examining dance forms from the world’s cultures creates knowledgeable world citizens. If you are a teacher of dance, and a potential employer asks if you bring with you a “comprehensive” dance background, what would you reply?

Are you proficient at:

1. The Dance Process (dancing, dance making/ dance compositional elements, dance critiquing)
2. Theatre Knowledge (theatrical terms, stage lighting, performance techniques)
3. Dance Science (anatomy, somatics, kinesiology, nutrition, injury prevention)
4. Dance Knowledge (dance history, dance cultural forms and anthropology)

Teaching dance for many cultures is to teach morals and the history of that culture… Dance can be used for many purposes in addition to educating the populace including performance to educate, healing through therapeutic dance, worship in ritual or liturgical dance, physical fitness (aerobic dance like Zumba!), entertainment such as theatrical dance, and socialize. Because dance serves so many different cultural purposes, dance education should be comprehensive, broad in scope and substantive. A dance teacher, employing proper pedagogy, would provide challenging and significant lessons, that are sequential in an ordered and incremental format, kinesthetic in that instruction should be seeking beautiful aesthetic quality within recognizable kinetic movement.

Figure 7.10. Thirayattam, meaning “colorful dance”, is a ritual form from India in the Kerala region. This dance is performed in sacred groves intended to please the deities and ancestors. Teaching about the cultural function of dance, no matter the style, is crucial for dance education to be robust and meaningful

(Panavalli. (17 November 2015). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indian_Ethnic_Dance-_%22Thirayattam%22_(Pookkutty)_._Am_Environmental_theatrical_art_form.jpg)

This theory of multiple intelligences helps the field of dance to have gained educational respect. It’s not just for “fun”… Dance has a more important role. It’s important for educators to reach all people, and dance is one way to do that, to help develop aptitudes and explore successes in all people. Be a student advocate! Being a dance teacher is important! “Different modes of thinking provide the most productive ways ahead (for humanity)… Diplomacy, statecraft, leadership, politics, persuasion, negotiation, entrepreneurship, envisioning alternatives, and a host of other ‘unscientific’ activities all depend on imagination and creativity and are all essential to the human enterprise” (Consortium of National Arts Education 1994, p. 7). Some of civilization’s highest accomplishments are in the activities that depend on the imagination.

• Mayan Chichen Itza in Yucatan, Mexico
• Matryoshka Russian Dolls
• Leonardo DaVinci’s Mona Lisa
• Borobudour, Java Indonesia
• Oral Storytelling, Native American keepers of history
• Daigoji in Kyoto, Japan
• Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota
• Adumu dance
• Hebrew, Thai, Tibetan languages and scripts
• Ludwig van Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata original sheet music
• Boudhanath in Kathmandu, Nepal
• Michelangelo's David in Florence, Italy.

Now visualize a scantron form - Is this something humanity values for hundreds of years throughout history, time and space? No.

So to stimulate the creativity in your students, good pedagogy and good instruction calls upon dance teachers to use analogies. An analogy is a comparison — usually either a metaphor or a simile — that helps to explain something or make it clearer. For example, to encourage young ballerinas to assemble their arms in third arabesque, call them Alligator Arms (like the jaws of an alligator). Or when describing a jazzy leg kick with sharp up-accent, refer to it as feather battement (it brushes up fast, then descends slow and controlled).

Definition: Analogy

To describe two dissimilar things as sharing a resemblance of a particular aspect Similarity in form or function between unrelated concepts.

The use of analogies is fun, no matter the age group, and it also encourages thinking, perceiving, and processing information on a ‘staircase’ toward more complex thinking (see Figure 7.11). From the general awareness of accessing not just a dance vocabulary word, but the analogy that incites memorization, this leads to skill development to higher order thinking, master status can only come when a student is proficient in all levels of learning. One by one, each level of Bloom’s Taxonomy increases the functional cognitive complexity. That is the respect that dance educators earn should they authentically take on the mantle of responsibility to approach dance education and theory through a pedagogy that develops the next generation of truly educated dancers.

Figure 7.11. The LEARN-DO-COACH, or TEACH staircase to mastery!

(https://tkmg.com/wp-content/files/Fig-4-1-stairs-progressive-learning.jpg)

Sequential dance education is how a dance teacher selects, plans, and orders the content of their classes. To avoid being a haphazard teacher, sequencing the content of lesson plans rescues students from redundant and repetitive class meetings (McCutchen, 2006). It’s important to go from simple to complex steps and combinations. What are ordered and incremental instruction methods? Since a dance educator will most often be expected to select the content for their classes, they are thereby responsible for planning lessons. Systematic skill building can only occur when a dance teacher takes the time to select, plan, and order their material for the year, the semester, the month, whatever the curation of their class. But what’s the best way to achieve this?