7.10: Inquiry Based Dance Education

Since the learning targets in a dance class should be highly focused, specific, short-term goals that are shared with students at the beginning, throughout, and reviewed at the end of a lesson (McWherter, 2021), the learning plan should be developed using Bloom’s revised taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). This will provide a scaffolded way to increase rigor in the dance classroom that does not alienate beginning dancers and ensures instructional alignment with student learning outcomes (Armstrong, 2019).

Your students should be asking:

• Why did my teacher have us do this exercise?
• How does this lesson relate to what we did last week?

YOU should be asking yourself:

• What is missing/What did I leave out? (partnered grand battement - Miss Debi always leaves out ‘right of way’ the first time)
• What did they learn by that?
• Was today an effective lesson?

Ask Questions About Yourself: Does my Curriculum and Instruction …

• Have a logical sequence?
• Speak to a multi-level class?
• Accommodate different rates of learning?
• Use verbal, kinesthetic, tactile and auditory approaches to support all learning styles?
• Make sure these questions and efforts appear in your final Lesson Plan and Teaching Practicum.

Inquiry Based Dance Education

Inquiry based dance education is about investigation (McCutchen, 2006). This style of dance instruction invites students to participate, investigate, and problem solve. Let’s detail both investigative and the investigative teaching styles. Problem solving requires a learning process that invites students to participate to foster active learning and self-actualize. The only way for your dance students to meet Maslow’s (1943) “esteem needs” and to ultimately “self-actualize” (see Figure 7.13), is to engage them in an active learning environment.

Figure 7.13. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

(Tigeralee. (23 October 2015). Maslow's hierarchy of needs. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maslows_hierarchy.png)

While aesthetic dance education upholds artistic standards and requires the discernment of an educated artistic viewpoint, meeting the needs of your students within the dance classroom can touch upon the safety and security, love and belonging, and the cultivation of self-esteem. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (Maslow, 1943) also outlines the potential for self-fulfillment, where dance can be a process of seeking experiences that can inculcate something as profound as an intrinsic, teleological sense of purpose.

While creating, performing or responding to dance, to create an inquiry-based classroom is to ask dancers to participate in the creation of class culture, class structure, such as leading warm-ups, making tactile corrections on the teacher who does a step incorrectly, or conduct an investigation to solve a dance problem in the choreography. Inquiry requires discernment, too.

In seeking to attain the extraordinary in dance, where excellence is more than mere aesthetics and kinesthetic competence, the quality of your dance classroom hinges on investigative and participatory dance classroom.

Let’s detail both the participatory and the investigative teaching styles through using targeted dance questions to stimulate your students to analyze (left brain function) and to imagine (right brain function). You are accountable for student achievement, a quality program, substantive curriculum! So ask your students: What do you “see” in this dance, not just technically, but socially, historically and politically?

Probing questions

• What do you think the choreographer is trying to communicate by doing ________?
• If you were the choreographer, how would you explain the piece to the set designer so he’ll understand what to create?
• Video Viewing: Ohad Naharin’s The Hole (2013) set on Nederland Dance Theatre:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqPXFQa3l_E
• Ask Yourself:
• What does the choreographer want you to think? Feel?
• Answer this question: “What is most crucial for the execution of a successful pirouette?”

What does Miss Debi think? What have your different teachers said? What do YOU think?

Figure 7.14. American artist Cecil Howard’s cubist danseurs, an abstract sculpture made of plaster created between 1913 and 1915

(Copyright Galerie Vallois, Cecil Howard. (1913-1915). Plaster polychrome cubiste sculpture representing a dancing couple, realised in 1913-15 by american sculptor Cecil Howard. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cecil_Howard-Couple_de_danseurs_(1913-15).jpg)

Question: Did the artist work with dancers or a choreographer? In what ways is the sculpture angular or spherical? What textures do you see? What is the tone, mood, meanings?

Now watch Crystal Pite in The Seasons' Canon (Autumn) posted by aero sceno (2018) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW7uORb9H8c

What artistic difference would it make if the stage were bright yellow with a Ferris wheel spinning and the dancers were in clown costumes? Asking investigative questions, making even absurd inquiries to challenge students is the hallmark of critical thinking.

Part of inquiry-based dance education could also engage contrasting like concepts with vastly different artistic renditions. Watch Kirov Ballet’s Swan Lake (Repertoire choreography by Petipa set in 1877) Finale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI7AsZGnyi4

Now watch Matthew Bourne’s version of Swan Lake (1995). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfzP8OiJZWo

How is this video relevant to today’s discussion about looking at the world through the lens of dance, taking into consideration social and cultural context of the male dancer? Could Matthew Bourne have successfully staged Swan Lake in this manner in 1877? Why or why not?

Figure 7.15. Thierry Blannchard, male dancer

(Thierry Blannchard. (2019, July 28). Thierry Blannchard Shoot. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thierry_Blannchard_Ballerina_project_brasil.jpg)