Literacy...

First thought...
Still thinking about this whole idea. Dance and literacy, and dance literacy. They are different things and sometimes mistakingly used interchangeably. Literacy through dance is learning language (reading and writing) from participating in dance. Dance literacy is understanding terms and ideas in dance. They are both important and definitely enhance one another's effectiveness on student understanding of the world.

Second thought...
One of my courses at NYU visited ARTSCONNECTION. They are a non-profit arts-in-education organization that bring dance, literature, music, theater, and visual art into the public schools in NYC. Recently they have been given a large amount of grant funding to implement an English as a Second Language (ESL) program, which focuses on teaching English Language Learners (ELL) through the study of dance. This is an incredible program and has inspired me to look into this type of dance education. The students learn english through the study of movement because they use many words and counting in order to do the movements. Dance is described using adjectives, nouns, and verbs as well as numbers. For this reasons the students learn language through an experiential approach; when they go around someone else they learn the word because they also have a physical sensation associated with it! WOW! This is how things should be learned. It is very DEWIAN (John Dewey)!

Presentation Finale!!!

YAY!!!!! The green team did it. We presented out project on Wednesday December 12th, 2007. The website looked amazing. When we first started designing this project I was nervous about how we were going to split everything up. But as time went by things fell into place because everyone in the Green Team group was able to compromise and work well together. It was very nice to share the load of making this website. Danielle did a great job a putting everything together. Eunkyung made a beautiful and surprisingly touching (thanks to the Ken Burns effect) movie of prominent BAM artists. Although our website was not as fancy as some of the other projects I am proud of the research we did in order to find out if our idea could even be used in the classroom. I learned an incredible amount about history from the process of creating this webpage. Now I am motivated and inspired to learn more about the BAM movement and I hope that our website has the same affect on others who come across it.

Go Green Team!

We have narrowed down out initial project idea, dance and theater in the 60's and 70's, to focus specifically on the Black Arts Movement that occurred during this time period. This movement is often referred to as the cultural/artistic cousin to the Black Power Movement that has its roots in the civil rights movement and continued until the mid 1970's. Numerous black artists, dancers/choreographers, and writers/playwrights presented their work and broke down racial barriers. Some of the most prominent figures were Alvin Ailey (dancer/choreographer), Rod Rogers (dancer/choreographer), Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins (playwright), Adrienne Kennedy (playwright), and Spiral (a collective of 12 African American artists including Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Emma Amos, Reginald Gammon, Richard Mayhew, and Alvin Hollingsworth, meet to discuss the commitment of African American artists to the civil rights movement and to debate the necessity of a black aesthetic).

Our group aims at putting together a reference/resource web page for teachers who are interested in this subject and want to develop a unit or lesson focusing on the Black Arts Movement.
The web page will include:

• A time-line of current events, dance events, and theater events from 1963-1979
• Links to useful websites
• Applicable standards from the New York City Blueprint for the Arts in Theater and Dance
• Photographs
  

"The two hallmarks of Black Arts activity were the development of Black theater groups and Black poetry performances and journals, and both had close ties to community organizations and issues. Black theaters served as the focus of poetry, dance, and music performances in addition to formal and ritual drama. Black theaters were also venues for community meetings, lectures, study groups, and film screenings...Black Arts theater proudly emphasized its activist roots and orientations in distinct, and often antagonistic, contradiction to traditional theaters, both Black and white, which were either commercial or strictly artistic in focus." (from the website The Black Arts Movement-BAM (http://aalbc.com/authors/blackartsmovement.htm)

Literacy and Dance and How Technology Can Help

Today most young people understand the world through technology. They own iPods, Wii systems, have conversations over their phones via text messaging, and generally access information quickly and efficiently through technological means. We can communicate at a speed and distance unlike any other time in history and because if this we know more about the people in our world than every before. Although dance happens in the body and generally in real time there are numerous technological resources that can contribute to dance learning process. One of my favorite examples of this is through the website Joy to Learn (http://joy2learn.org/index.php). Here you can access a wonderful e-presentation focusing on the history, art, and study of tap dancing hosted by the late Gregory Hines. To support the e-presentation are teacher resources for lesson planning. Other websites of this nature can bring many different forms of dance into the classroom that the teacher might not otherwise be able to teach. Technology can also be used to present information in the form of power point presentations. One of the best tools is interactive websites where students can post reflections, questions, and set up teacher moderated discussion chat rooms about specific subjects learned in class. By encouraging students to use language to articulate their ideas about dance via the internet they are developing literacy.