 |
|
| 25th Biennial Conference of ICKL | |
| Escuela
Nacional de Danza Clásica y Contemporánea, Mexico July 29 (Arrival Day) - August 5 (Departure Day) 2007 |
 |
SESSIONS Paper Toward multiliteracies in educational dance: A qualitative study of a college choreography class in which motif description played a key role in creating, analyzing, and communicating about dance HEILAND,Teresa - USA In increasing frequency, educators on a global scale have been emphasizing the importance of building into academic settings approaches to literacy that prepare our global society to be better prepared to negotiate meaning and communication with flexibility and complexity when “reading” symbols in culture, language, and imagery. This approach toward multiliteracy has not clearly explicated the complex literacy possibilities that educational dance has to offer. When speaking about literacy about dance, recent documents have pointed towards literacy of dance as the ability to speak about dance, and to write in English, and little focus has been placed on how motif description plays into learning, literacy, and transfer. My research study looks at how motif description, a form of literacy in itself, actually facilitates aesthetic understanding of dance and increases rate of learning of the concepts of the Elements of Dance, thus creating multiliterate dancers in a non-major college level choreography course. The qualitative and action research study examines three semesters of college age non-dance-majors who enrolled in a choreography course to fulfill their core arts elective. This course purposefully has a focus on literacy through the use of motif description symbols from Language of Dance® and Laban Movement Analysis as a path towards literacy and focus on concepts rather than just doing, which has often been the case in a non-major course in choreography. My aim was to gather thick description of the student’s experiences, and focus my own teaching, in order to make a case for implementing motif description and Language of Dance® teaching theory and tools into K-12 and higher education courses towards richer dance literacy. People have been remarking over the past few decades that dancers’ technical level has been increasing all over the country, but our dancers’ abilities to communicate about dance, dances, and dancing could be better supported by our concerted efforts of developing systems for teaching all three types of dance literacy (moving, speaking and writing about dance in one’s first language, and writing and speaking a dance specific—second—language of motif description or Labanotation). By integrating motif description and Language of Dance® in pedagogically scaffolded curricula, the entire field of dance could be better understood, and also appreciated as a sound academic system for arts education for all students, public and private. Knowledge during my study was gained by sorting and thematizing excerpts of students’ experiences with the work from their journals and assignments, and during discussion and interviews. It is clear that by gathering a thick description of non-dancers’ experiences with symbols, that concepts about symbols reinforce and speed up learning for most students, no matter what affinity to learning style or multiple intelligence the student reveals initially. Nearly all students were surprised and worried that symbols were part of working with dance, but nearly all grew to be quite fond of the playfulness they evoked. This playfulness was the affective link that encouraged students to easily know all of the Elements of Dance quickly and easily. While students admitted they would likely forget the symbols if they didn’t use them again, the concepts they learned about dance by using them will remain a part of them. This study reveals how clearly these students focused their learning and communication using motif description. If we continue to focus research on how motif description encourages learning, multiliteracy, and transfer, we can make a profound case for 1. having educational dance for every student in all our schools, 2. Language of Dance certification as a requirement for public school teachers, and, thus, 3. highly literate dancers representing an art form that offers so much diverse learning.
|
