Welcome to my new blog, and… where to start? Maybe just a little more about me and where I'm coming from than appears in that little blurb over on the side…
I've been teaching dance for -- well, decades (plural, not to put too fine a point on it). I started out in city rec departments, teaching ballet to kids and folk dance to adults, and spent a long time teaching technique in a little neighborhood studio; but for the last fifteen years I've been in public education, most of that in secondary schools. Just this past year, after losing my dance program to budget cuts and school consolidation, I have been teaching visual art (and some creative dance when I can) in elementary school.
I am passionate about a lot of issues around dance education, and I hope to talk about some of them here; I also have a lot of stories to tell from my years of teaching, and I hope to tell some of them as well. I can't promise any rhyme or reason in how I choose what issues to write about or what stories to tell (especially since most of my best dance teaching stories are from the past) -- this is a work in progress and an experiment, so I hope you will bear with me and get something out of it, and I would love to read your comments and perhaps start some conversations somewhere along the way... Thanks for reading
Waiting to hear some of those stories you will tell about dance education. I just finished teaching a southern California dance institute with my Luna colleagues and SoCal peer leaders. One of the high school teachers shared her her story today about how her intention when she took the position was to facilitate one dance artist per year pursuing dance as a career. She then reflected on how each year she realized there was a student who was pursuing dance - dance in studio settings, dance and medicine, dance in performing companies. As dance educator we have a responsibility for writing and documenting our field-thank you for starting this.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to the conversations! Thank you.
ReplyDelete