Studio owners continually face the challenge of finding qualified instructors. While aspiring performers spend time developing dance technique, little time is devoted to enhancing teaching skills. In this article, the author, a studio owner, describes the problem she had with her dancers' lack of teaching knowledge and details how she discovered…

Letting the dance work itself educate the student and conducting related experiential classes is an important foundation on which to build readings, discussions, written assignments, and projects. Dance educators can design the educational investigations to be fueled directly from the art and support the investigation with contextual information.…

Rhode Island has recently mandated a new kind of arts requirement for high school graduation that involves proving proficiency in one of four art forms: music, visual art, theater, or dance. How the state came to mandate this law, how proficiency is currently defined and assessed in dance, and what effects the cuts in arts education funding will…

As a dance teacher I am interested in finding ways to improve the quality and effectiveness of the dancers' learning process. My investigations toward this end have primarily focused on uncovering essential somatic characteristics as they relate to dance teaching and learning. The essential somatic concept that the senses and sensitization of the…

Turnout is a vital element of many dance techniques. Aesthetically, turnout is used to fulfill artistic goals related to body line and design. Mechanically, it increases the potential range of movement in certain leg gestures and facilitates movements sideways through space. Turnout involves external rotation of the femur along its long axis in…

This article presents multiple perspectives of "petit battement sur le cou de pied". These perspectives include historical, biomechanical, and pedagogic points of view. The article offers useful information for ballet specialists and applied research studies aimed at ballet pedagogy. (Contains 2 tables and 5 figures.)

The scientific basis of human movement has been studied by dance students, teachers, and researchers in the United States since Margaret H'Doubler established the first dance major at the University of Wisconsin in 1926. Since then, students, faculty, practitioners, and researchers have applied a scientific line of inquiry toward dance movement…

This article describes the Dancing across Disciplines (DAD) project (1998-2002), which the author conceived in the idealism of the potential of dance and music as the great levelers, in the promise of the celebration of difference through rhythm and song, funded by a $225,000, three-year grant from the US Department of Education's Fund for the…

Within the Western fine arts tradition of concert and theatrical dance, new dances may be created in any number of ways. No matter how dance making begins, however, unless the work is to be improvised afresh each time it is performed, a process of developing, revising, and "setting" the work needs to take place. To move confidently and…

Choreographers working in an educational setting often use student dancers as the instruments of their art. The inherent power dynamic of this relationship generates ethical issues that can affect the choreography and the learning experience of the student. At what point do choreographic decisions infringe upon goals for a moral, student-centered…

Traditional composition classes teach the tools of choreographic craft, yet leave students in an odd limbo in which they create a special breed of "college dance" that has little to do with the current dance world. In the twenty-first century, choreography teachers must go beyond an emphasis on traditional craft and help students find their own…

In many dance composition courses, creative production is the objective; movement invention and novelty are praised. Yet often this valuing of creativity is not reflected in the course design. Historically, the basic methodology for dance composition is a show-and-tell model: present the movement study, then critique it. If creativity is truly…

In this article, the author talks about the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a growing and leading advocacy organization that is focused on transforming teaching and learning in the new century. The Partnership brings together the business community, education leaders, and policymakers to define a powerful vision for 21st-century education and…

This study examines the cognitive experiences of children as they engage in creative projects in both dance and poetry. The data includes interviews with fifth graders from an elementary School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about their lived experience of writing poetry and creating dances. Students interviewed for this study participated in a…

Dance is often positioned in contrast to more "academic" disciplines. Its marginalized status in pre-collegiate education means that it is too often absent from schooling. When taught at all, it is often used for the purpose of increasing student engagement or advancing understanding in another subject. In such a role, the standards, concepts, and…