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.