| October 20 2002 |
| Chapter II:
WHAT EDUCATION KNOWS ABOUT DANCE "Now surely nothing but universal education can counterwork this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of labor. If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called: the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former." Horace Mann HORACE MANN ON EDUCATION AND NATIONAL WELFARE 1848 (Twelfth Annual Report of Horace Mann as Secretary of Massachusetts State Board of Education) "For it assumed that the aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education -- or that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth." John Dewey, "AIMS IN EDUCATION" in DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION, 1916 WHAT EDUCATION KNOWS: John Dewey's view of education was, in a way, an extension of the notion of universal education, fostered by Horace Mann some sixty years prior. Mann had a democratic, principled belief that education could equalize the classes. Dewey was more interested in the engagement of mind and body of each child within the natural social fabric. In a way, Dewey’s notions were merely an expansion of Mann’s belief that every child should have equal access to education. Eventually, and fostered by Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954, the notion extended beyond equal access to education and became access to equal education. A distinction between education for all and education for each is an important one to remember, because policy is built on which approach is in the forefront in any given decade or administration. The controversy continues today. Between E.D Hirsch's Core Knowledge schools, which emphasize a universal curriculum for every child, and Howard Gardner's emphasis on predispositions toward individual learning styles in each child, the arguments continue. Both sides of the argument are about equal access to equal education; the disagreement is about what constitutes the ideal education in a democracy. Certainly, the participation of educated adults in a democracy is desirable. And perhaps we can even agree on some of the content of an ideal educational process--a core curriculum that serves both the individual and the society at large. Hirsch has taken this a step further; his schools provide the same curriculum for first graders no matter what the socio-economic status or preparedness of those first-graders. Gardner would pay much more attention to the particular motivational factors of each child, his/her interests and talents and would focus on learning experiences that allow the child to make his/her own sense of the material by applying it to a project: "We have an instructive difference in how one goes about becoming highly literate, having a large vocabulary, reading readily and for deep comprehension. I believe that the "lust for literacy" emerges when individuals care about gritty, consequential topics and want to discover more, even when such knowledge and understanding is not part of a school assignment." Gardner, http://www.pz.harvard.edu/WhatsNew/HGNYT.htm "We have argued in favor of teaching topics that have the greatest potential for developing general competence and narrowing the test-score gap between groups. We made an inventory of the knowledge that is characteristically shared in American society by those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder. That turns out to be the knowledge taken for granted in American society -- in college classrooms, in conversations with strangers, and in books and newspapers addressed to the general reader. Since that knowledge is taken for granted and not explained, ignorance of that assumed knowledge will seriously handicap those who lack it. We therefore argue that this "elite" knowledge ought to be the possession of every citizen in a democracy. The desire to change and improve the character of that assumed knowledge is admirable, but until we succeed in doing so, we should not withhold it and thereby handicap those who lack it because of accidents of birth." Hirsch, http://www.coreknowledge.org/CKproto2/about/articles/breadthvsdepth.htm One can see the democratic principles behind both perspectives; one is simply more about the education of each child and the other, the education of all children. The split thinking between them has lead to deep confusion in the classroom. The arts have been impacted by the division as well. Schools that use Gardner’s “Multiple Intelligences” approach can find themselves with a panoply of delivery systems and not enough content for the “tests”. Hirsch’s schools can effectively prepare the students for tests, but may not address individual needs, deficits, or different cultural factors. These tendencies both work against dance in the classroom: Hirsch’s because dance has never had a traditional role in American classrooms and Gardner’s because dance is subsumed under kinesthetic or aesthetic learning and becomes one more modality in a full day of modalities. Gardner is also challenged by a belief that the arts are not instrumentally useful and should be taught primarily for their intrinsic value and usefulness to those predisposed to a particular modality, thereby missing the point completely that dance is movement and our first modality. But John Dewey's view of an educated democracy included a basic belief in learning through experience. Freedom of mind was a goal, but many misunderstood this to mean that freedom was the means whereby learning takes place. Thus in the 1960s and 1970s, the open classroom, with self-directed and unstructured learning time, was a misinterpretation of what he proposed. The removal of obvious physical boundaries led, in many cases, to over stimulated and anxious children, acting out from a lack of purpose. The inability of some children (often, boys) to narrow down and hone in on a task became evident in the years following the redesign of suburban classroom space. The rise of Ritalin use does, eerily, follow the attempts of educational theorists to move education outside of the confines of the four walls of a traditional classroom. The relationship between increasing numbers of diagnosed cases of ADHD and changes in school architecture is not causal, however. Research shows that symptoms or predilections for simultaneous processing of new information or indications of an inability to screen out stimuli arise long before we ask the children to sit quietly in a room full of equipment, bulletin boards, windows, twenty-nine other kids, and perhaps, the rest of the first grade placed at varying degrees of distance. We expect that each one will screen out what he/she does not need to attend to, and will happily focus on the book in front of him/her or the teacher standing some distance away. When it doesn’t happen that way, we see pathology. Taking down the walls, but leaving all the other colorful choices for the child’s attention intact, did not often lead to the freedom of mind Dewey saw as the bedrock of democratic education. More often, it led to a struggling teacher, competing with a myriad of other forms of stimulation, trying to manage a group of multi-focused, kinesthetic kids. Field trips were taken off the schedule. Bank Street School’s classrooms (a school in NYC based in John Dewey’s philosophy) had no more than 5 students working together on a project. The average “open classroom” had close to 30 students and only occasionally were small groups utilized. Today the tension between teaching each child and every child continues and for pretty much the same reasons that unfolded during the 1960’s and the open classroom controversies. Classes are often crowded and students are from wildly diverse backgrounds and preparations. The diversity is not merely one of culture of origin or race; within cultures there are wide disparities in wealth, lifestyle and academic preparation. Programs such as Head Start make a big difference in a few lives, but many of our neediest children slip by the nets we’ve designed to catch them. The DC Public Schools my children attend have a terrible reputation collectively, but within each school, there are students from wealthy, privileged backgrounds, and some from very poor families but those with high academic expectations and preparation. The test scores of America’s children therefore are a kind of snapshot of performance on tests but are not necessarily a sound picture of each child. Take my son again. He has, for the past three years, tested above the 90% on reading/vocabulary but below the 10% on math. He has a math disability; that much is clear. But when his scores are conflated with those in his school (there are about 100 students in each grade), it is easy to say that the school is doing a pretty good job. As his mother, however, I can point to his low score and say he is not getting what he needs—at least in math. This puts the administration of his school into a dilemma. If one-ten children, obviously bright, are dragging the average math scores down below average, what does the school do? Put needed resources toward those few? Give the entire grade more math? Eliminate other modalities for learning and give them more experiences in taking these types of tests? The dilemma is not new—from the earliest days of this country, the notion of what constitutes a humanistic education has been debated—even before we thought about educating everybody, including girls and former slaves. When John Adams was in Paris in May of 1780, he wrote home to Abigail, his wife, about the wonders of architecture, music, and painting that he saw in such a sophisticated city. France was hardly a democracy then-it was actually on the verge of revolution itself, and the arts he spoke so highly of were the result of hundreds of years of financial support and artistic participation by the monarchy. But Adams was not thinking about government support for the arts so much as lamenting why the new country needed to focus on war and politics. He described how he hoped America would develop: "I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, Natural History, Naval Architecture, Navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine." Adams understood that an educated man ought to engage in the arts as a matter of course. The arts take us beyond the utilitarian and quotidian and bring color and tone to a democracy. He understood this higher function, but it took the notion of universal education to begin the journey toward arts education for all. We are still not there, though. Only 7% of American schools, for example, have dance programs taught by qualified teachers. …ABOUT DANCE: Dance’s original purposes were both communicative and transformative. The performative aspects of dance, which are the most recognizable to most people today, actually developed later in human history, flourishing first with the Greeks. Dance in a pre-literate world developed as a kind of nonverbal language at first. The dances were encapsulations or depictions of events. From cave paintings and early artifacts we imagine societies in which elements of time and space were encoded in movement postures and gestures. The transformative aspects of dance developed as religions and spirituality evolved. The ancient gods were always near. Dance was a means of connecting with the deities. The boundaries between gods and men were broached through all the arts. Not only did people dance to embody the gods, but in some cultures, the gods danced their stories through the dancers. As roles in societies became more stratified and specific, the notion that some dancers were better at dancing took hold. Dance moved away from the tribal connection with music and aligned more with the emerging performance art of theatre. While maintaining the narrative and even some of the religious aspects, virtuosity and technique began to emerge as well. During the time of the Greeks, dance education evolved. The children of the wealthy had dance instruction and practice. This early dance technique involved both gymnastic and narrative forms of dance—the functional and the expressive. Dance was both a form of physical exercise and a mode of story telling. As such, dance developed a social function as well. With training and practice, one’s dancing ability revealed a certain status. As with all aspects of culture at this time, however, dance became divided along with the Apollonian and Dionysian. Apollonian dance was structured and geometric and Dionysian dance was wild and abandoned. The split between these aspects of culture continues to inform our understanding of dance to this day. The Greeks gave us both the notion of learning through and in the arts, and the legacy of a split dichotomy between function and expression. Even now, public dancing is against the law in some jurisdictions; so embedded is it in the notion of the salacious. Western religion certainly did not commence with such a sense of dancing as evil or libidinous. In the Old Testament, Miriam and David both dance before the Ark of the Covenant, and dance is a part of ritual and celebration. It isn’t until Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils that dance is portrayed as noxious. Salome, supposedly a very good dancer, seduces her stepfather, Herod, into killing John the Baptist. Confusing the art form with the evil intent of the performer has given dance a bad name. Salome may even be a source for the notion that dancers are whores, although economic conditions for dancers in Europe in the 17th –19th centuries certainly contributed to this perception. Dance education, along with many aspects of Greek education, fell by the wayside for quite some time after the Romans finished turning Dionysus into Bacchus and splitting classicism apart from play. To meet political ends, the Romans had, necessarily, to adjust morality and cultural concerns as needed. Dance moved underground, with the peasants, serving the needs of ethnic identity and ritual. Harvest dances, wedding dances, funeral dances were all identifications with a particular culture and were a means of maintaining community identification in what were rough times for small villages. For over a thousand years, dance education, at least in the western world, consisted of an oral tradition of passing down dances, with small modifications, from generation to generation. There was however, a good amount of cross-cultural influence in addition to the community-based dancing. As performers formed small troupes, which traveled from town to town bringing stories, songs, news, and dances, various cultural influences were transplanted. For example, the Morris Dance, often associated with Celtic tradition, migrated from the land of the Moors—Spain and North Africa. The process was very slow and evolutionary and quite organic. Were it not for the itinerant troubadours, dances and ritual practices would have been much more parochial. During the Renaissance, however, things changed. Drawing on the Greek ideal of classical learning involved, once again, education about the canon of works considered essential for participation in court life. These works included Greek poems and plays. Traditions moved from court to court much more quickly as political alliances were formed and dissipated. Physical training, for both court etiquette and military purposes, was also revived. Every court worth its gold had a dancing master. The dancing master was the final word on matters of etiquette and deportment. He also borrowed dance steps from the peasantry and upgraded them according to the aesthetics of courtly behavior. Eventually, the dancing master went from being an educator to an artiste. He became a choreographer, designing not only the latest social dances for the performed Suites of the court, but also creating full story-ballets from an amalgamation of Greek and then-contemporary themes. In France, he designed roles for the King, Louis XIV, which reinforced the supreme elegance, power, and deified eminence of the Sun King. From that lofty perch, the dance academies were opened, to codify, develop, and promote the art of the dance. As the roles of court musician, playwright, portrait artist and dancing master evolved, separately developed pedagogies flourished. Dance technique particularly found its home in the academy. At first, performers were trained jointly in music and dance but eventually the academies separated and opera and ballet established performing companies dedicated to one or the other. Most of the early ballet stars were men and many of these were also choreographers. It wasn’t until the late 1700s-1800s that the ballerina ascended to stardom. The mid-19th-century rise of Romanticism did more to affect dance and dance education than dance did to affect the concurrent trend toward democracy. The fairy creatures, dancing on pointe and lit by theatrical moonlight, enticed young men away from their proper paths and seduced them into passions that could not be quenched by mortal women. The quandary of these highly trained performers, both male and female, can be imagined. They were ill paid, but much admired. Relying upon the patronage of the wealthy and royal, dancers became both stars and whores, both famous and dependent. What Salome started, the Romantics finished off. Nevertheless, by the time the Czars took on the primary patronage of ballet, dance training in Europe was both exclusive and ascetic. The academies of ballet were a lot like convents. Children were selected at an early age and whisked from their villages to a regime of study and role definition designed to reflect the superiority of one court over another. The ballet became a political statement about status, nation, and cultural superiority. In the U.S. however, vaudeville also influenced dance education. Because of the accessibility and popularity of the art form, which included music, dance, theatre and visual design elements, people in this country were exposed to the entertainment aspects of dance. It was incredibly virtuosic. From the buck-and-wing dances of the Negro Circuit to the acrobatic ballet dances of the mainstream vaudeville shows, audiences were exposed to incredible physical feats. Small town dance studios opened up, teaching tap, ballet, ballroom and acrobatics. The local dance studio trained America's children in both dance technique and deportment. It was hardly universal access to dancing but it was an accepted and available mode for physical and creative expression for some privileged children. While Johnny and Janey were waltz clogging and tumbling, the schools were undergoing a wave of reform unlike any other. In the 1880s, Horace Mann had ensured that public schools were accessible to all, even the poorest (although Jim Crow laws kept the “colored” children from these same universally accessible schools until Brown vs. the Kansas Board of Education in 1954). But education for all meant not equal education, but the same education. In our attempts to be equitable, we were, too often, willing to settle for the lowest of standards and commonality of content. Reading, Writing, and ‘Rhythmetic were what everybody learned; social studies, science, and the arts were taught in comparatively few places. The colleges and universities contributed in significant ways to the trajectory of educational reform in the twentieth century. The first major program in dance, for example, originated in 1926 at the University of Wisconsin. It took another 35 years before certified dance teachers were hired in the public schools. But dance education as a field within physical education had a long and somewhat glorious span. Between 1926 and 1960, hundreds of studies and articles were written about the content and approaches within dance curricula and programs in the public schools. The articles were primarily reflections upon practices that dance and physical educators were developing in PE classes. Many of these practices were designed to utilize folk and social dances for democratic purposes—for community-building, cross-cultural understanding (especially after the end of World War II), and social mixing. In the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government actively supported the development of arts education programs through programs such as the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), Central Midwestern Regional Educational Laboratory (CEMREL), and Arts IMPACT (Interdisciplinary Model Programs in the Arts for Children and Teachers); each of which put arts educators into schools via projects. Many of the projects were designed to facilitate the transference of arts experiences into academic subject areas, or to improve school communities. The projects did not produce data that supported the transference of specific learning milestones from an arts experience to a cognitive experience, as in dancing the alphabet or learning math through music. But research did reveal that the arts play an important role in attendance rates and overall academic achievement. In Chapter III, we will look at just how the research in the past thirty years both supported and cast doubt on the issues of transference and socially-based learning. So, what does education know about dance? As in all marginalized sub-cultures, the entities on the fringe know more about what goes in the center than the entities in the center know about what is going on along the margins. And so, education has gone about its somewhat chaotic and dichotomous business without being much informed by the likes of dance. We aim to change that. Dance, for its part, has addressed the needs of education in both direct and influential ways. Just how rich the body of work produced on behalf of education is will be forthcoming in next week’s installment… Posted by Karen Bradley at 4 : 52 pm | Leave a note {0} |
| September 04 2002 |
| Chapter I
WHY JOHNNY SHOULD DANCE: How Moving Informs Thinking Chapter 1 Notes From A Marginalized Subculture Johnny, as everyone in the educational reform movement knows, can’t read, can’t calculate and has poor social skills. He’s been diagnosed as ADHD and put on Ritalin. He’s overweight, watches too much TV, and plays too many video games. For Johnny, we have many suggestions: whole language, or phonics, or both, Core Learning, the University of Chicago Math Program, site-based management, magnet programs, school vouchers, charter schools, home schooling, after care, Ritalin, school reform, Prozac. But Johnny is a slippery boy. No sooner do we propose a solution than new data reveals yet another deficit in Johnny’s makeup. Maybe it is test anxiety – or food additives – or post-traumatic stress disorder -- or lead. There are so many possible dangers to overcome, so many situations and events that undermine learning. It’s a wonder that he learns at all. He is so full of maladies that at times, the whole notion of public education seems like lunacy. We are having a hard time these days deciding what purpose education plays in our culture as well. Is our goal to educate the masses—education for all, no matter what the quality of that education? Is there a universal curriculum—a base of study that benefits every child? Do we need to individualize the learning environment so that each child learns? Are there multiple intelligences, core curricula, tests that can tell us exactly what and how each child learns? The “No Child Left Behind” Act of the Bush administration reflects our confusion about what we expect from public education. With the emphasis on both parental selection of school settings and the basing of federal funding for new programs on “scientifically-based research”, poor Johnny is in even more of a quandary. He has to choose, apply for and hope for a voucher for a decent school, pass standardized tests, and participate in research projects in order to prove that what he is learning and how he is learning is of value. At the risk of adding to the conundrum, this is a book about why Johnny—and all our children—should dance. Given the terribly challenging issues listed above, and our society’s dim view of the arts, and particularly dance, that statement may seem a bit implausible. But, in over twenty years as a dance educator, I’ve observed many children who are adept at avoiding learning, including several who live in my house. I have found it most instructive to notice how children operate when they are being successful learners. When a child is operating successfully, he/she is using strategies developed that are unique to that child, but highly revealing. Every once in a while, Johnny gets it. His focus shifts, he slows down, or speeds up, he looks around the room, or looks at the paper in front of him. But something changes. We can be equally enlightened by what Johnny is doing while he is not-reading, not-calculating, not-focusing, not-interacting? How is he doing it? Where is he doing it? There is a lot of information in the answers to these questions. But, when we focus only on what a child cannot do, or will not do, we are diagnosing from an incomplete picture: we are looking at the holes in the cheese and calling the whole picture cheese-with-holes. We have missed the particular flavor. And then we want to fill the holes with a uniform response: medication, therapy, a packaged program—fully tested on kids just like yours! Example: Take Larry, my son. (Please. He’s available for an evening’s entertainment and frankly, we’re exhausted). Some time ago, I observed him at the beach, where he had spent the morning not-learning to ride a bicycle. He was 11 at the time and had learned to ride a bike when he was six. Nevertheless, much happened in his life in the ensuing years and he had not actually been on a bicycle for a few years. A nearby 8-year-old was riding his bike all over the island. Larry was torn between his need to not-learn and his desire to keep up with his younger friend. The not-learning phenomenon was well-trod territory. Success, in my son’s mind, was always elusive and tested mightily with as much failure prediction as possible. Throw in a few dramatic reactions such as “I forgot…” or “I broke my foot!” and you have his recipe for non-success. At that moment though he was involved in a scenario of his own design. Something about Neptune, I think. His powers were far beyond mere bicycle riding or multiplication tables. He had assigned his two younger assistants, “Aqualad” and “Alfredo”, to carry weapons and to do his bidding. He had created the rules for his sci-fi world that he spelled out with both logic and passion: character was consistent and language, plot, and denouement highly developed before the hour’s end. My son is the best writer I know and he is funny, sweet, anxious, and stubborn. His public school teachers, while they tried to see only the best in him, suspected he was devil-spawn. Ritalin had been suggested. Since then, Larry has figured a lot of things out. He can ride a bike now and his grades are consistently high. How that came about is a story about observation, relentless love, and theatre. We will come back to him. He is hardly unique in his challenges, but he was and is unique in how he learns best. Ritalin was not the answer, for him. It can help many children, but… A major question for our times is: Are we applying Ritalin (or other excellent but narrow-spectrum remedies) to particular learning styles? Did my son need his neurotransmitters aligned, his classroom environment altered, a reward for altering his style, or just some understanding ears? We do not know the answers and so, too often, we jerk our kids around, trying to find what works; what “fixes” the problem. By seeing each child as a problem or problems to be corrected, we overlook the information available. Each child does come with a handbook. It is his/her behavior/movement style. By observing how the child negotiates his/her world, how he/she attends, sequences, responds, organizes, expresses him/herself, relates to others, and just plain copes, we see learning. By ignoring movement behavior, we are failing to notice a treasure trove of insights that could more fully inform our interactions and our understanding of that child. In fact, we already do a great deal of observation of movement. Our language is full of examples of such observations. This child is “impulsive.” That one is “delayed”. Another one is “flighty”. My own “dances around the issues”. Etc. We use dance and movement as metaphors for attitudes and learning styles. In reality, they may not be metaphors as much as accurate descriptions of attitudes and style. We call this phenomenon “movement behavior” and the analysis of it “movement description.” Such perspectives can provide a map for understanding the terrain each child occupies. In Chapter 2, we will look at some of the current trends in educational theory and practice through which we have managed to avoid the obvious strategy for understanding a particular child’s style: watch what they do. However, for now, let us look at how children’s individual styles are manifested as patterns in infancy. Any parent will tell you that our children arrive with some discernable personality. Babies are fussy or serene, intense or placid, variable or consistent. One may visually track moving objects at an early age; another hears and turns toward music immediately. Culture, environment, the preferences of parents will influence who the child is, ultimately. But we know our influence is external and there is a set of internal characteristics that are highly resistant to change. In the first weeks of life, babies establish several key patterns, most of which are strategies for gaining nourishment. Heads turn toward the breast, or, if bottle-fed, heads might rise upwards or forwards. Smells call the infant outwards, toward the clues that tell him/her good things are out there somewhere. Sounds bring the infant’s head around, toward the source of the sound. Patterns appear and the eyes track these. Thus, the infant begins his/her exploration of the world of objects. It is the beginning of a construction of reality; a belief system. So too, does the infant expand or grow towards an object, or shrink and retreat. The first tasks of differentiating good from bad, attractive from repellent, inform us about the nature of the world and our place in it. For this reason, our first “intelligence” (in Howard Gardner’s use of the term in his books about multiple intelligences) is kinesthetic. There is no formal language, although making sounds will elicit responses that are reinforcing of the development of more differentiated sounds. Visual spatial skills, mathematical acuity, the further refinements of mind and body are yet to be determined. But in this kinesthetic realm, there are already indications of talent, proclivities, and stylistic preferences. Some children visually attend to the environment in multi-focused or expansive ways. Some tend to hone in on one point of focus and have a marvelous ability to concentrate on one thing at a time. Some assert themselves and their needs with a high degree of intensity and some seem to charm their way into having their needs met. Some get a motor going, revving themselves up for continuous action, while others move with occasional bursts of speed, in between periods of simply drifting in and out of action. (The above descriptors are taken, in part from the work of Dr. Judith Kestenberg and her movement profile. For more information about developmental movement; specifically the Kestenberg Movement Profile, go to: www.sectionfive.org/kescomment.htm) As a child develops, one essential factor in the development of personality is how the environment supports or discourages the child’s own natural inclinations. A child raised in a tiny apartment, who must walk blocks to get to a small enclosed urban park, will have fewer opportunities to develop gross motor skills than the child who lives on a farm and who helps the grownups cover a lot of physical territory on a daily basis. The urban child may develop a narrower but more specific set of skills, such as those lending themselves to drawing or computer games. The child on a farm who loves to draw will of course do so, if drawing is encouraged and rewarded sufficiently. How and what he or she draws may be partially informed by the wide-open spaces of the prairie. The same is true for the urban child, who may draw vertical shapes. It is not illogical that basketball is the urban child’s gross motor game and football the realm of farm boys. There are always exceptions, of course. The environment and parental preferences are strong influences, and there are always those individuals who break the molds in which we are sure we had them. But environmental factors are clearly influential. I remember the first time my daughter, who had been brought up in California, visited her East Coast grandparents. She spent hours going up and down the stairs. Her own one-floor house had about four stairs, her grandparents house had eighteen! The flexion-and-extension pattern of stair-climbing and descending was a new skill for her and worthy of much practice. The fact that such a skill is a fundamental pattern for many sports activities explains, in part, her intuitive need to go up and down those stairs. So let’s take a look at our boy Johnny. We already know that he is having trouble reading, doing math, and getting along with others. But what CAN he do? When Johnny was a baby, he managed to negotiate a complex environment, to get himself fed and nurtured at least adequately. Perhaps the environment was chaotic and he was over-stimulated or perhaps he liked it that way. Somehow he learned to walk, talk, play games, get his needs met. While much of what we can see in Johnny’s behavior is adaptive, meaning he developed it out of base necessity, some of it is personal style and preference. The children (not all of whom are boys) I have observed often prefer simultaneous, as opposed to sequential, processing of information. Johnny will expand to take in everything at once or he/she will shrink to avoid taking in anything at all. While some children can clearly delineate a systematic approach to learning, others prefer and seek out overload. One Johnny I worked with many years ago, after a series of sequencing exercises which I tried desperately to turn into “fun” games, turned to me and said, quite plaintively and with more insight than I had, “But I like being in chaos!” (Our solution was to allow him to make up a “tornado dance” at the end of each ½ hour movement session, which functioned as a balance for the meticulous practicing of new, sequential patterns). For this child, the key to understanding him, and all of our children, is engagement. Engagement is both a general and a movement-based concept. Children are engaged when body and mind are attuned to the moment. This means their breathing, their attention, their readiness to learn are all observably in sync with the event. If I have learned anything from the hundreds of children and young people who have been in my classes over the years, it is that everyone finds his/her way into the world. One way or another, a child finds his/her passion. It is not always what we would choose for them. In adolescence, their passion is often for the others, no matter how inappropriate the behavior of the others may be. But I always hope the world does not reject their paths and expressions while on that path, providing those expressions do not harm others. I have come to believe that each of us wants to participate, to be heard, to be at the table. Those we reject turn into the kids who avoid learning, who become sullen and uncooperative, who shoot their classmates. When children are entranced and connected, they do not employ the adaptive and defensive modes of not-learning. At the beach, in front of an easel, or reading a good book, children are overtaken by imagination. Imagination, creation, innovation are products of something we all do, but often get angry with children for doing: dreaming. We all dream about our fantasies, our wishes, our destinations, but we also deny our children this experience when we over-schedule and mercilessly over-test them. Demanding engagement works with only the most cooperative of children. None of those types lives at my house . The more common scene I observe (at my house and elsewhere) is the child who daydreams. He/she may look dazed, disconnected, and vacant. However, if we look more closely, into his/her eyes, we can see the wheels turning. Something’s going on in there. If we wait patiently and just watch, whole worlds will unfold in his/her play. Sometimes, what comes out looks suspiciously like a dance. If movement is the way into the world, how and when, then, does movement become dance? For the purposes of this book, dance is defined as an extension of movement, a refinement of technique, expression, and creativity in the kinesthetic realm. Specific training in ballet or tap or jazz dance is yet a further refinement of the general category of dance movement. Dance movement is that form of movement that is creative, personal, rhythmic, and expressive. It arises spontaneously, like language, and has language-like components in that certain movements come to mean specific things to the individual. It is more than a sign language, though. The meaning is evident through the entire movement, not simply one gesture. Like poetry, the whole is greater than the individual parts. Not all play and not all movement gets to be dance. Nevertheless, in a (perhaps-surprising) number of interactions, imaginative play, cultural and personal expression, we can perceive a dance. As pointed out earlier, our language uses dance as a metaphor for many such moments: the dance-away lover, the dance of anger, dancing the night away, having a ball, shall we dance? Dance is often invoked when we are in the realm of expressing emotion, avoiding emotion, or becoming dreamy. This is no illogical interpretation; dance comes out of the flow, or ongoingness of movement, and so do emotions. We can attempt to mask or hide emotions, but only rarely, in the case of certain severe personality disorders, can we move and not reveal what we feel at the moment. Both the mask and what is behind the mask are evident. And this is precisely the reason why dancing makes so many of us uncomfortable. It is a way to enter the unconscious, emotionally laden world of our dreams, nightmares included. It does not appear to be in the realm of the productive workaday world, where success is defined in profit margins. That dance is the most marginalized of sub-cultures, economically and in the eye of the public is due, in part, to the visceral and powerful ways that our deepest hopes and fears are revealed while we are dancing or watching dance. Profits are not an attribute of the dance industry. Nevertheless, profits are an external validation of success in our culture and we all hope our children will be successful. That is why dance is the least-represented discipline in public education. Why ask taxpayers to provide expertise, time, and space for an enterprise that promotes dreaming when our children require skills that will allow them to succeed in those arenas we do value? If Johnny is not-learning, he must be wasting his opportunities to develop essential skills. We had better fix that quick. However, the most successful and innovative businesses have learned differently, perhaps because several people who were once Johnnys founded them. At Microsoft, for example, dreamtime is required. Any new venture begins with reading, dreaming and brainstorming. “There are no bad ideas at first,” said Bob Bejan, former Director of Strategic Partnerships and Global Marketing at Microsoft. “ We get together off-site and throw ideas around.” As one advances at Microsoft, there is increasing fluidity of roles as well. “Microsoft is a generalist’s culture. When you’re trying to produce the platform for the whole planet, you need to be empathetic and attuned to all lifestyles.”(Bejan interview, Aug. 14, 2000). Bejan is a former dancer who got to Microsoft through his interest in interactive media and his experience in film production. But it is his background in choreography that allows him to see patterns of interaction in the flow of ideas, and his background in directing and performing that allows him to anticipate what the final product is going to look like. And Bob is never disengaged. His body rarely stops moving and his ideas flow readily. The discipline of dancing allows him to focus and trust what he is doing-- to shift as needed. Bob is only one highly successful technology executive with a dance background. In an interview published in Roger Von Oech's book on creativity, A Whack on the Side of the Head, Steve Jobs of Apple Computer fame points to the impact of his experience in modern dance at Reed College in the 1970’s on his way of thinking about certain computer games. These games, like choreography, deal with the movement of bodies in time and space. "Innovation," he said, "is usually the result of connections of past experience.... [At Reed] most of the men took modern dance classes from a woman named Judy Massee. We did it to meet the women. I didn't realize how much I learned about movement and perception from the class until a few years later, when I worked at Atari. I was able to relate how much resolution of movement you need in terms of perceiving things in certain ways for video games”. For Bejan and Jobs, dance is not simply a metaphor. It is a way in which they can understand phenomena that are elusive and complex. Not all children experience dance at this level. In fact, most children in the United States experience dance as a part of physical education (it’s taught as an eight-week unit, in the winter, when they can’t go out to play--often, it involves square dance-- with girls/boys), after-school programming, or, if privileged, as a class their parents force them into to learn social graces at the charming age of 13. In too many cases, dance as it is taught today is a far cry from the full-bodied engagement in moving that took us into the world as infants. The fact that Bejan and Jobs came to dance late (both in college) reflects the very real issues of gender and our expectations for particular types of behavior and expression. That Johnny is a boy and is identified primarily as a boy is notable. While girls have labels and issues of engagement as well, the literature on gender reveals that the identification of Johnny as the Ur-problem child is no prejudiced choice. Back in the 1970s, several studies revealed a teacher-bias in favor of boys. It was noted that teachers called on boys more often and were more directly focused on the males in the class. In the 1980s and 90s, books were published reminding us to pay attention to how girls learn. The gender differences continue to intrigue us. We have seen the pendulum swing several times and most recently, we learn that for the first time, more women than men are enrolled in medical schools. We do not want to risk under-educating one gender by solely or primarily addressing another. Nevertheless, there is useful information in the studies on gender and learning. We know that girls statistically at least prefer narrative learning. They like to have information in a context. Boys seem to do better with linear logic and facts. This difference explains, in part, why boys tend not to ask for ballet classes and girls do not build with Legos. Of course, there are many exceptions. But my son will be the first to tell you why he does not take ballet. When he was five, he wanted to go to dance class. He had been aware that we had a children’s program at the university where I taught at the time and thought it would be fun to do what Mom did. I signed him up for a class for both boys and girls. There was only one other boy in the class the first day and he would not dance. So Larry sat on the side with him. The next week, we walked up to the door of the studio and Larry said he hoped the other boy would be there. He opened the door to see and quickly slammed it shut. “I can’t go in there!” he said. “Why not?” I asked. “Is the other boy there?” “No…” he said. “But it’s too pink in there.” Indeed it was. Every girl in the room had on pink tights, pink ribbons, and pink tutu skirts. For them, the costume was part of the context for learning. Larry was not interested in being a dancer. He just wanted to dance. The gender differences are interesting and informative about how we can and should teach dance. However, it is not the purpose of this book to either promote or deny such differences. While dancing in particular, if not the arts in general, has gender identification with the feminine or even the effeminate, the kind of dance education that reflects such a limited perspective is only a small part of the valuable experience of dancing. I am not promoting a “pink” culture. Johnny should dance, not because dancing is inherently masculine or feminine, but because it is inherently human to move creatively, rhythmically, spontaneously, reflectively, responsively, and expressly to learn, interact, and communicate. The goal is not to move little girls and boys to the margins of our culture but to move the arts, including dance, to their rightful place at the center of human growth and development. Posted by Karen Bradley at 8 : 46 pm | Leave a note {1} |
| September 02 2002 |
| Explanation
Ignore previous Explanation, which consists of one letter, and an unfortunate one at that. What I will be doing with the site is posting the book chapter by chapter, like a Dickens serial..you will have to come back regularly to see how it comes out, and who triumphs in the end...Chapter I, NOTES FROM A MARGINALIZED SUBCULTURE, will be up soon. I hope you will post comments in the guest book, located to your right as you read this. You can also send me e-mail and if it is interesting and with your permission, I will post those comments as well. Other postings may include sidebar-like mini-discussions that are slightly off topic but explanatory, and these will refer you to books or websites with more information. I want to keep this blog somewhat limited to dance education/movement analysis/research/practice/policy issues. If other topics start to take over, we will just start another blog site! Thanks to all of you who have visited so far! Posted by Karen Bradley at 8 : 34 am | Leave a note {0} |
| Explanation
W Posted by Karen Bradley at 8 : 28 am | Leave a note {0} |
| August 31 2002 |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karen Kohn Bradley is Visiting Associate Professor of Dance and Director of Graduate Studies in Dance at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also a Certified Movement Analyst (CMA) in Laban Movement Analysis and the Chair of the Board and Executive Committee Member for the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. She serves on the Board of Directors of the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) and is a Past-President of the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD). Bradley authored the dance essay in the recent publication CRITICAL LINKS: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, available from the Arts Education Partnership (AEP). She has also published commentary and reviews of dance research in the Arts Education Policy Review, the Dance Research Journal, and a number of industry newsletters. Karen Bradley is also an acclaimed choreographer/movement designer for theatre and most recently choreographed the Woolly Mammoth production of Charles Mees' BIG LOVE at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. She has worked with a number of theatre companies and actors, coaching movement and staging period and style-based events and segments. Bradley lives in Washington DC with her husband Richard Bell, a political troublemaker and editor, and three entirely demented teenagers, who provide balance and perspective on all she does. Posted by Karen Bradley at 9 : 42 pm | Leave a note {0} |
| Introduction
Not that anyone appears to be wondering about this, but dance is a great modality for learning and there is data to prove it. If Johnny can’t read, write, or count, he/she can dance his/her way to better thinking. After all, we all move and use gesture to communicate how we feel. And movement underlies dance. And human beings have danced since the beginning of intelligence—to celebrate, to understand, to remember, to retell… However, when one points out to most people that dance provides an effective means for learning reading, math, social knowledge, and artistic production, they have a tendency to, with rare exception, blink, glaze over, and edge away slowly. Alternatively, and this will be discussed in the ensuing postings, those who are invested in maintaining the notion that dance is limited to the technical, rarified practice of art-making and performance only, tend to lose their cool completely. Dance, in our culture, is placed firmly along the margins of human endeavors—modern dance, for example, is thought by many to be somewhere beyond opera in the category of impenetrable and overwrought art forms. Ballet is for the hoi polloi and ethnic dance is insular and culture-specific. In the next few months, this author hopes to expand the reader's understanding of dance and the role it plays in learning, in social interactions, in educational and cultural policy-making, and in the evolution of the human spirit. While the goals are lofty, perhaps overly so, I welcome feedback, arguments, discussions of pertinent issues. Posted by Karen Bradley at 9 : 26 pm | Leave a note {11} |
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