Hard news...

I found out this morning that one of my former students from EOSA was shot and killed... Marcus was one of the dancers from 2008, in that amazing class who created the dance about youth killings in Oakland. His entrance words for that piece were "I lost at least three of my friends last year… with all this happening, it makes me think about how much longer I have to live..." I had described EOSA, in my NDEO presentation that year, as a school where kids walk around in t-shirts saying “RIP, gone but not forgotten" and miss school for way too many funerals. And so it goes on...

Rest in peace, Marcus, you were beautiful and will never be forgotten...

Claudia, Marcus, Asia, & Johari

East Oakland student to Mills

I haven't written a lot about my current dance class this year, in large part because it has been one of the most… well, shall we say challenging?.. classes I have taught in all my years of teaching teens — an odd and unfamiliar combination of not taking Dance seriously as a class or subject, but still caring about a good grade. This group has been hard to reach (which is also one reason my blog posts here have been pretty sparse of late).

But we do have small successes, of course, and one came recently in the form of the only senior in the class fall semester. Back in November, we had had the opportunity to attend the Mills College Dance Repertory concert as a field trip (for anyone outside the bay area, Mills is a fairly exclusive private university which boasts one of the preeminent dance programs in the area). Many of the students seemed disengaged during the performance, and needed some reminders about theater etiquette; but this senior was captivated, and talked to me extensively about both the dances she saw and the Mills campus on the way back to school.

Unfortunately, this student had to transfer out of the dance class in order to complete some other credits this semester… But a few weeks ago, she stopped by the class to tell me that she was so taken by the atmosphere on the Mills campus that she had applied there, and had just found out she was accepted! I spoke to her about it again last week, and she said that she was lining up her scholarships and financial aid, and intended to attend Mills in the fall.

The reason this is big news is that, even though Mills is located in East Oakland, just a couple of miles from the inner-city communities where my current students (as well as all my former students from EOSA) live, the low-income students in the community who even aspire to attend Mills are few and far between (those with high aspirations are much more likely to try for the UC system, which is generally much better known). One of my creative dance teaching mentors, herself a Mills graduate, mentioned to me that when her organization began working with the Oakland schools to create an elementary school dance program in the neighborhood, one of her dreams was that she would see an East Oakland student go to Mills… so, one small success from this class!

NDEO survey (vital information!)

This is a little different from my usual post, but it's an important issue, so… The NDEO (National Dance Education Organization) has been conducting a survey to try to establish a database of K-12 dance programs across the country. One of the reasons that this survey is vitally important is because Dance as an academic discipline has traditionally been left out of the FRSS (Fast Response Survey System) surveys established by the National Center for Education Statistics to collect issue-oriented education data… which is then used in congressional testimony, Department of Education reports, and all kinds of education advocacy. Dance has been left out of these surveys because of the (circular) reason that we just don't know how much dance is out there in the schools! Meaning, of course, that when funding and curriculum decisions are made, we are left out of the conversation again…

So — NDEO began a survey to begin to remedy this situation. The deadline for filling it out has been extended to April 6th — if anyone out there reading this is in a K-12 program and hasn't filled it out, or even knows colleagues who have yet to fill it out, please get to it! The survey form itself is here: K-12 Data Collection Form; with more information about it on NDEO's homepage. Thanks, everyone!

the value of dance education (revisited)

Not long ago, I created a short slide presentation on the value of dance education (in order to have something visual for administrators who may be considering beginning a dance program) — then expanded the text in order to have something to send... I still think, in terms of the true value of dance education, that I can hardly improve on what my former student said (which I posted last August); but I thought I might just copy what I wrote here, since it encompasses some ideas and language that I have refined over the years...

Dance Education — a vital component of arts and movement curricula

The arts are an important, though often overlooked, facet of education  expanding our vision and training the heart as well as the mind. Dance as an art form has been particularly overlooked in our education systems, although dance is one of the most universal and elemental of art forms.

Dance is the only discipline which combines an art form with a physical activity. In today's television- and computer-oriented society, giving students a start toward a lifetime of physical activity is a necessity. A dance program can provide opportunities for movement during the school day, aligning with the First Lady’s "Let's Move" initiative to combat childhood obesity.

Research* shows that many students today  learn best through kinesthetic intelligence —  so including dance in a comprehensive curriculum helps to provide access to learning for all children.
* including:
Clara C. Park, CSU Northridge: Crosscultural Differences in Learning Styles of Secondary English Learners
Dr. Stephen Earl White, Columbus Technical College: Factors That Contribute to Learning Difference among African American and Caucasian Students

The study of multicultural dance forms can enhance our understanding of one another as humans: through the study of a variety of ethnic dance styles, students can explore the  commonalties as well as differences among widely disparate cultures. Dance can be a way for students to experience for themselves the complex, profound art forms of other cultures.

Taught with a creative base encompassing exploration and discovery, dance helps to expand crucial critical thinking, problem solving, and spatial thinking skills, as students expressing themselves through movement are challenged to think in new ways and to form their thoughts and feelings into physical reality.

In standards-based classes using the Create-Perform-Respond model of national standards for the Visual and Performing Arts, students learn to create using the basic elements of dance — Space, Time, and Force/Energy. Problem-solving is inherent in creative dance, as each lesson poses a problem related to a specific dance element, to be solved in a movement study.

Students will also use their knowledge of dance elements to create and communicate meaning — creating, refining, and performing dances “based on ideas, experiences, feelings concepts, or images that have personal meaning or social significance" (National Dance Standards); and will build analytical and critical thinking skills by responding to the work of their peers and reflecting on their own work.

In California, only 34% of high schools, 10% of middle schools, and 14% of elementary schools offer standards-based courses in dance.

CDEA part 2 - the Dance Credential issue

During the morning roundtable session at the Northern California CDEA mini-conference, the ever-present issue of the teaching credential in Dance — or, more precisely, the lack of one — featured prominently in the discussion. For anyone reading this from outside of this state, my understanding (though some of this goes back to before my time as a teacher) is that California used to have a single subject credential in Dance (as well as Drama), but it somehow went by the wayside in a restructuring of credentials that happened in the early 1970s. So currently the applicable credential for teaching dance in this state is in PE (the state apparently assumes that if you're qualified to teach PE, you must be qualified to teach dance — sigh…). There are other ways to go about it — a multiple subjects credential with a subject matter authorization in Dance, for instance — but the PE credential is pretty much the standard.

One problem with this., of course, is that once you have to get a PE credential, they can make you teach PE — which is what I ended up doing for my first few years in public schools, and what I don't want to have to do again… Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against physical education, I believe it is vitally important in its own right — it's just that I personally know pretty close to diddly-squat about teaching any sports (with the sole exception of synchronized swimming, which I'm afraid really isn't called for too often in PE programs), and I do not like teaching subjects I know nothing about!

So there has been a push for many years to get the dance credential restored (as well as the drama credential — drama teachers are in much the same boat as we are, they have to get credentials in English). The discussion at the conference was somewhat hopeful, as there is some movement among the state education department and various arts organizations to bring the issue forward… perhaps there is a possibility of the dance credential being restored within my teaching lifetime...

However, one interesting angle to the PE-for-dance credential problem that I had never even thought of popped up in the course of the discussion: One dance teacher, who had recently been hired to replace a retiring teacher, mentioned that another problem with the PE credential requirement is that lots of PE teachers end up applying for dance positions — she said the previous teacher told her that out of a huge pool of applicants, the vast majority were "PE people" which they had to weed out to get to the relatively tiny pool of dance people… Well, I sat up and took notice at that — because this happened to be a position I had also applied for, but had never been called for an interview. I had presumed at the time that they had been looking for some very specific experience — performing with a major company, a particular technical emphasis, whatever — but on discovering during our lunchtime conversation that there was nothing like that and the only thing that truly separated us was her out-of-state dance credential, I began to suspect another possibility: that I was one of those "PE people" weeded out of the applicant pool! Could it be that someone in HR doing the initial screening actually didn't know that that the PE credential is standard for "dance people" getting credentialed in this state (because there is no dance credential!!!), and simply rejected out of hand all those applicants credentialed in PE without even looking at the resumes? I wonder… does this happen often???

There is one way to put dance on a credential, it is called a "Specific Subject Matter Authorization" (SMA). BUT here's the Catch-22: because the reason for an SMA is to "allow an individual to teach a class in a subject outside the area in which he or she earned a credential"; and because the Commission on Teacher Credentialing considers dance to be "subsumed under" the umbrella of PE, you can't add an SMA in Dance to a PE credential! So, even though all of my coursework was in dance, there appears to be no way to show that on my credential (sigh again). Just another way the arts (especially dance) are disrespected and disregarded in education...

CDEA mini-conference

Last weekend I attended the California Dance Education Association (CDEA) mini-conference for northern California... it was not as big a gathering as in the past (before CDEA became an affiliate of NDEO and everyone started going to those conferences instead), but definitely worthwhile — I hope CDEA will grow to have larger (perhaps statewide) conferences again!

First, we had a fabulous workshop on creative dance and the African aesthetic from Cherie HIll from Luna Dance Institute. I especially loved the treatment of the Brain Dance for warmup, and the juxtaposition of open-and-close with various body parts — it felt like discovering anew everything I've ever been taught in technique classes in African forms, from the inside out. Wonderful work! In the afternoon we had a roundtable discussion on many issues, including the struggle to reinstate a dance credential in California, about which more in a later post; and we finished the day with a wonderfully rejuvenating Somatics workshop with Susan Bauer.

I think one of the valuable parts of the conference for me, oddly enough, was the informal discussion we had over lunch. We dance teachers are so often lonely "singletons" at our schools — a typical high school may have any number of math, science, social studies, or English teachers, but only one dance teacher (if that). So while, say, math teachers can get together at department meetings to share ideas and strategies, at our department meetings we see the art, music, and drama teachers — nice for sharing cross-curricular integration and links between art forms, but definitely not the same as talking with other dance teachers about the nuts and bolts of teaching our specialty! So this conversation was invaluable — in a short 45 minutes we gave each other some great ideas on student musical choices, structures for casting student choreography and adjudicating pieces for a concert, dealing with administrators who don't understand dance… and much more. Such a rich conversation! Next month a colleague and I will be starting a little gathering of local dance teachers for just this kind of discussion — now I know how valuable that can be, and I hope it will be able to grow into a regular discussion group.

Teenagers…

(sigh) Here it is almost the end of January, and this is my first post of the new year —I'm afraid I have radically slowed down since I began last summer (perhaps I should have paced myself a bit). My excuse this time is that we have been dealing with medical issues in the household: our older little dog (our dogs and cats are my babies) has been diagnosed with diabetes, so we've had a lot to learn about glucose monitoring and insulin injections and such… And, after pondering and agonizing over it for many months, I have finally finished up a long missive on global warming (soon to go up on another blog) — the one thing that occupies my mind almost as much as dance teaching — which has used up a large chunk of my writing brain lately… I guess the upshot is that I do have a life outside of dance and teaching, and life intervenes. So it goes (to quote Vonnegut).

So anyway — I hate to start the year on a negative note, but I feel the need to vent a little about teenagers… Not all teenagers, of course — I have worked with so many responsible and dynamically creative teen students — just the ones who don't care to know anything about the world around them, that they will soon inherit...

I usually teach world / cultural dance forms in the spring semester, and this spring we began with Congolese (I got to practice that sentence I learned in a workshop at NDEO, "I am not an expert in this form, but I have learned ti from an expert and I would like to share some of what I learned with you"). We practiced the Congolese rhythm Zebola, then in our weekly "classroom day" (minimum days too short to get dressed and dance, so we go to a classroom for reading or video observations), I gave the class a one-page reading on the history of Congo and Central Africa — from the ancient Kingdom of Kongo through King Leopold's brutalities and the US-backed execution of Patrice Lumumba. Of course I always expect some pushback to reading about history — "this is boring," "this is a dance class, why should I care about this"… So I brought up the current situation, how resource wars over the coltan needed to power our electronic devices like cell phones are fueling violence in the Congo, hoping to bring some kind of relevance in how what happens across the world is connected to our own lives. The reaction was, unfortunately, along the same lines — "so what are we supposed to do, stop buying cell phones?" I tried to explain about our duty as world citizens to at least know what goes into the things we buy and what our governments do to control resources… but to no avail.

Maybe I'm asking too much, but I know that while I was teaching at EOSA there would always be a critical mass of students who were interested in the social issues inherent in what we were studying — perhaps that was because of the truly exceptional social studies teachers on staff there… I do also remember that when I was in high school, there was definitely some social awareness of what was going on in the world. For goodness' sakes, we listened to protest songs on the radio! (that pretty well dates me, I guess). Maybe it has a little bit to do with what gets onto the radio these days — with the corporate-dominated radio stations playing commercial pablum, teens just don't get as much exposure to the issues… Who knows?